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United MileagePlus Purchased Miles Sale
United is running a sale on purchased miles through August 31. The specific offers each member gets are targeted. The one I received is 50% off purchased miles.
Once you go to the purchase miles page and choose ‘buy miles’ you’ll be prompted to log into your account. That’s to see which offer is available to you.
I got what’s the biggest offer, largest discount, I’ve seen for buying United miles: 50% off.
The offer is a tiered offer, requiring purchase of at least 50,000 miles to get the full discount.
Buying the full 150,000 miles costs $2821.88 or 1.88 cents per mile.
Here are the terms and conditions of the offer:
Now, I value United miles at 1.6 cents apiece. Valuation depends on how many miles you already have and how you’re going to use them (as well as how soon you’ll use them). I have plenty of United miles, so I’m not a buyer at almost 1.9 cents apiece.
But this is the cheapest I’ve ever seen United sell miles, and you can certainly do well topping off an account towards an award. Getting enough miles for international business class tickets can mean this makes good sense.
So you may want to check out what offer you’ve been targeted for as many will find this worthwhile at a 50% discount.
probably ripe for a delta style devaluation.
Interesting: I have tons of UA miles and got a 35% discount offer; my wife has not many and was offered 50%. Of course we’ll not be buying any anyway as we “buy” them at less than 1/2 cent a mile.
I got 35% too. At 2.275 cents a mile, it is no bargain. That is typically what they offer me for buying extra miles on a trip. For my flight on Friday, they are offering me 10K for $230
i got 50% offer, but 150k miles is not enough for me and the price is too high..
to me I miss the heady days of churning citi AA exec for 50k for spending$5000… at a 2% opportunity cost of a cash back card, that’s 50k miles for $100 or 0.2 cents per mile.
I agree this is the best deal UA has given when buying miles. This is a similar offer to what UA did roughly a year ago when they had a 100% bonus on miles bought if over 4500 mileageplus members participate in the promo. Once the 100% threshold was reached, the cost was also 1.88 cents per mile (even when buying only 1000 miles). Mommypoints wrote a blog article about it here: http://mommypoints.boardingarea.com/2014/09/04/100-bonus-united-miles-one-hour/
Frank: “Of course we’ll not be buying any anyway as we “buy” them at less than 1/2 cent a mile.”
That is fantastic! How do I buy them even at 1 cent a mile?
@ jediwho – Think ink !!! Enough said
I have an Ink card and don’t think I’ve ever come close to earning 200 miles per dollar in spend. I’m familiar with 5x points, but 200x? Clearly I’m doing it wrong!
Did everyone forget last summers promotion. The more they sell the bigger the discount. Took a while for anyone to purchase hem. Eventually they reached A 100% bonus. To the person that buys them for half a cent could you tell us how ?
FYI I was also offered the 50% off deal. I dismissed it figured I needed to wait for the super promotion again.
Would this count towards PQD requirement for the year?
I am going to meet the silver 25k miles but still short 900$ in spend. Also recently got the United cc so another 50k miles enroute. So debating if this is worth it for me.
I got offered 35% I’ve only got like 6,500 miles as I credit everything to Aeroplan but got 6,000 miles as compensation for a subpar business class flight.
Def not worth doing, I might try and burn these 6,500 with a CC transfer to bump it to 20,000 then bail since otherwise these miles are basically locked.
So, is buying miles considered “Travel”?
@Gary – I just got the Citi Thank You 50K card from your link. Would you recommend using that to purchase the miles for the (Airline) 3X Thank You Point bonus? Thanks for pointing out what you think these points are worth vs what they are priced at. We can all make up our minds from there if there is value for us.
I too got the 35% offer that they couldn’t even be bothered emailing the offer for
With their absurd over priced premium partner awards
Ill let them store that offer where the sun refuses to shine
Perhaps some gullible fool will bite
I can use United visa but that just drops to 1.85. Does the Bold provide something else?
@@ jediwho – Think ink !!! Enough said
can you help us?