The points & miles community has long been clamoring for the ability to pool miles amongst family members. Now, that’s a reality with one airline, as United Airlines introduces family sharing. However, there is one potentially huge catch, depending on what your travel habits are.
Why you fly, the miles you earn accrues in your account. It doesn’t matter if you’re traveling as a family; everyone earns their own miles. However, this can become problematic when said family then wants to redeem miles. At best, everyone needs to make their own redemption reservations. However, if not everyone has enough miles, but you want to pool together miles to redeem for one (or a few) tickets, you either had to pay a transfer fee, or couldn’t do this at all. Thankfully, we now have a solution, as United Airlines introduces family sharing.
United Airlines Introduces Family Sharing
Why no one has done this before is beyond me. It just makes too much sense, right? This is especially true with Southwest, as a flight I book for Mrs. Island Miler with my points, gets refunded to Mrs. Island Miler’s wallet if we cancel. Bleh. But that’s not what we’re discussing here. No, we’re here to talk about how one airline is solving issues like this, as United Airlines introduces family sharing.
Specifically, any MileagePlus member 18 or older can now become a pool leader and create, well, a pool to share miles. Pools can be composed of anyone you decide to invite with no minimum age requirement for non-leader members. This is a boon for parents with young kids, as they can finally use their children’s miles with ease. Up to four other people can be invited, for a total of five people per pool.
That said, each individual MileagePlus member must contribute miles to the pool for them to show up there. Everyone’s miles won’t instantly become accessible, which is a good thing when you do this with friends or other non-family members (or you have adult children you want to do this with and are afraid that they’ll steal all your miles). And that’s an important consideration, because ANY pool member (not leader) can redeem pooled miles.
Speaking of contributing miles, it takes 24 hours for the miles to transfer into the pool. Once you transfer your miles, you can’t take them back, except for that 24-hour period while they’re not available. Further, if you decide to leave a pool, there’s a 90-day cooldown period until you can join another.
Finally, contributing miles to a pool will not impact progress towards you status. Likewise, contributions from others into the pool doesn’t help you with your status, either.
Important Consideration
While we’ve gone over many stipulations for the the new program, there’s still one critical consideration when discussing that United Airlines introduces family sharing. And that’s the fact that pooled miles may only be used for award redemptions on United metal. This won’t be an issue for some, but if you had your eye on redeeming your pooled miles for a flight on ANA or Lufthansa, then this isn’t going to be an option for you.
United Airlines Introduces Family Sharing, Final Thoughts
Again, I think it’s a great thing that United Airlines introduces family sharing. It’s something that needed to happen for a long time now, especially for families. If you’ve ever tried to transfer miles, it’s expensiveHawaiian Airlines World Elite Mastercard. That said, the ability to transfer miles for free isn’t new. cardholders can transfer miles to friends and family for free. But it’s still not as convenient an option as this. Hopefully, then, United will set off a trend among airlines.