What Should We Call United Miles Now?

by Gary Leff

Delta Skymiles are Skypesos, since they’re worth so much less than competitor currencies.

But what about United miles now that they’ve announced an absolute bloodletting of their award chart?

Frequent Miler suggests “Stardust.”

After Continental took over at United, United’s million miler frequent flyers were promised that they would continue to get annual upgrades. Almost immediately, though, those were taken away.

The ‘new’ United increased change fees on award tickets. They prioritized individual transactions over long-term loyalty by giving single trip full fare elites — even Silver elites — upgrade priority over 100,000 mile flyers. They started selling cheap upgrades to anyone at check-in rather than upgrading elites. And they prioritized ‘supported’ upgrades, such as mileage upgrades, over elite upgrades. So a general member with a co-branded Visa could upgrade ahead of an elite domestically.

What’s more their computer systems remain very broken. Their upgrade processes are broken, they do not run waitlists properly or continually. Savvy flyers using supported upgrades can ‘jump the queue’ by watching for space to open up. Their new computer system doesn’t even consistently properly ticket award travel on partner airlines pushing through ticket numbers to partners (meaning that award reservations can wind up mysteriously cancelled because the partner thinks they weren’t ticketed).

The one true improvement since the merger is the elimination of partner award blocking or throttling, where the airline denies that partner airlines are offering award seats even though those seats are available. But now with these new changes those seats have gotten much more expenseive.

These changes are just one more of United CEO Jeff Smisek’s “changes you’re going to like.”

When Smisek & Co took over they rebranded United’s “Mileage Plus” as “MileagePlus”

Now I think perhaps the better term would be MileagePoo.

That’s my first thought. The biggest drawback is the lack of a ‘plural’ but that’s not really required. Now that British Airways uses Avios, you can have 1 Avios or 100,000 Avios. And they prefer to say ‘Avios’ rather than ‘Avios points’ which they view as redundant.

I’m not a huge fan of that, and my suggestion means you’d have 1 MileagePoo or 100,000 MileagePoo (not MileagePoos). That may work better than MileagePoo miles. Then again, ‘MileagePoo miles’ could become the preferred usage.

What do you think?

About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

More articles by Gary Leff »

Comments

  1. We should start to call it MileageMinus

    That is in line with how I refer to their economy seats “Economy Minus”

  2. I love you dearly Gary, but “Mileagepoo” has nothing going for it from a cleverness perspective, nor does it really roll off the tongue

  4. What James said. Dreadful name.

    You hit a home-run with SkyPesos. Time to pass the baton to Greg with Stardust or even the oft-coined MileageMinus.

  7. One more vote for MileageMinus.

    The novelty value of comparing a devalued miles program to a worthless peso is already gone with Skypesos, so we’re never going to be able to match that.

    I think MileageUnplus would also be good. (I’m trying to reference Orwell’s Doublespeak/Newspeak here. United seems to be trying real hard to throw a bunch of poop at us and call the poop Great New Changes.)

  8. How about MileagePus, as in the yellow, oozing bodily fluid which is a sign of a bad infection…

  16. Maybe now you’ll stop bashing DL all the time, since your only objection seems to be redeeming Skymiles, even though they are better than UA in every operational measure.

  21. StarPoo and StarPoos or you can just call them crap or Kaka. Either way next year you’ll wish you didn’t have buckets of them…

  23. MileagePeanuts. I plan to use up the rest of my 300k peanuts for 3 Europe J RT before this annihilation of the award chart!

  25. @George Delta is a better airline to fly (except on a transatlantic route still getting the old business) than United. United still has a better frequent flyer program — even after today’s news.

  26. Ways to express your opinion:

    1)Cancel or consider canceling your co-branded products (e.g. Chase MileagePlus credit cards) and let them know why.

    2)Tweet #unitedunfriendly #united
    3)Email Jeff Smisek jeff.smisek@united.com
    4)Contact DOT: http://www.dot.gov/airconsumer/air-t…t-comment-form
    5)Contact BBB: https://www.bbb.org/consumer-complai…lines/2381304/
    6)Email Star Alliance (two award charts??): http://www.staralliance.com/en/conta…&subCategory=3
    7)The major bloggers should be contact the major news organizations to talk about it

  27. Hahahaha too funny! I stoppe dlaughing when I saw my MileagePoo balance. And to think I’ve just started burning SkyPesos after that devaluation. I always loved MileagePoo and its a shame. I would never fly United internationally. The serivce is terrible. I think I prefer to burn more miles for a better expierence then stick with United.

  31. Bloggers such as yourself have a lot of power (founder of milepoint, Conde Nast expert, etc). Have you reached out to united to put them on the spot? I’m sure your loyal readers who have clicked your links and used your pay services would appreciate you advocating all you can on this…

  32. While I like StarPesos, it’s derivative, and not disparaging enough of Yuh-nited. I’d go for SmisekMiles. Make Jeff’s name a synonym for devaluation.

  36. @daniel and I are on the same page. Came up with the same thing

    Let’s just call it MILEAGE MINUS, or MILEAGE MIZER MILES, they really are just after the $$ here. UA raked in the most $$ in fees last year, 4x the next closest domestic airline. They are doing something right, they are getting the $$ out of peoples wallets. IMHO, I chose poorly to focus my flying with UA all those years to make 1MM the hard way, only to get JS going forward and to have the 1.5MM miles I’ve banked (trust me, i spend them as often as I can) turn into 800K…

  37. Since UA is basically telling everyone to “get the L out”, just change MileagePlus to “MileagePus”

  38. Gary – is this the first time in blog history that you failed to mention that you coined the terms “skypesos” in a post that even vaguely referenced delta skymiles?

  40. I like Kilometers+, and it has a handy abbreviation. KM+

    Stardust is decent, but isn’t an obvious reference for those just getting into the game.

  41. Along those lines maybe we call it

    United MILLI-MILES Plus
    United MILLIMETERS, you’ll NEVER GET THERE!
    United MILLI-MILES, you can’t earn fast enough to get ANYWHERE
    United MILEAGE-MINUS, we take them away faster than you can earn them!
    United MILEAGE-MIZER, you’re going NOWHERE!
    United MILEAGE-MAXIMIZER-When you go ALL IN, we’ll get you just around the corner.

    The varieties of this are essentially limitless.

  46. MileagePesos is fine as well.
    Why not have a group of them
    SkyPesos
    Mileage Pesos
    Advantage Peses (coming soon)
    dividend Pesos

  48. “Un-branding” is tough. After AA pulled almost all their “saver” award availability — after years of having plausible “UA like” award availability — I started calling them DisAAdvantage miles on Flyertalk. I thought it was cute but, to my knowledge, it hasn’t caught on (yet!).

    There’s really no big reason to complain about UA today. The changes today are a classic “first world problem” — the type of thing that affects the “Flyertalk crowd” that churns so many credit cards that they haven’t seen an international coach cabin in several years. Honestly, I think you guys are a little spoiled, and I’m sure most frequent flyers have even less sympathy. You’ve become used to getting a lot of comfort for no money, and the math just doesn’t work for UA as so many more folks have been drawn into that game. For the average frequent flyer, these changes are no big deal. Now if UA started restricting award availability like DL does, we can start talking about comparable monikers to Skypesos.

  49. While I like StarPesos, it’s derivative and not sufficiently insulting of United post-Smisek. I’d go with SmisekMiles or SmisekPlus. Make Jeff’s name a synonym for something bad, like Dan Savage did for the name “Santorum”….

Comments are closed.