United mileage scam

I’ve spent years mastering the ins-and-outs of frequent flier programs.  I’ll save the details for another day, but I earn miles at $.02 or less and spend them at five-to-ten cents a piece.

But that system only works if you can actually spend the miles.

We all know the game.  Airlines make some seats – by no means all, or even most – available for frequent flier mileage redemption.  We accept that airlines are in business to make money, and our free tickets take a back seat to actual ticket sales.  So far, so good.  Airlines have sophisticated computer modeling that enables them to predict bookings on any given flight.  These programs also tell the airline how many seats to offer as mileage awards on each flight.  But as long as we know the rules of the game, we can still try our luck at getting that elusive first class seat on Singapore Airlines, since we know that we’re not chasing a ghost: there are seats out there available for mileage redemption.

But what if an airline changed the rules of the game and didn’t tell you?  What if that same airline lied to its own agents in order to further deceive customers?

Sound outrageous?  It is.  And it’s exactly what United Airlines does to its Mileage Plus program members who try to redeem their miles for flights on Star Alliance partner airlines.

The short version: United’s alliance partners make their frequent flier seats available to every partner program in the Star Alliance.  Remember, these seats are limited to begin with.  United then applies an additional filter to prevent United’s own Mileage Plus members from using their miles with their partners.

Why does United do this?  And what can you do about it?  Read on for the full details.

Since there are so many more Mileage Plus members than there are members in their partners’ programs, there are more United fliers redeeming on, say Air New Zealand than there are NZ fliers redeeming on United.  This imbalance has to be addressed, which ends in United making a payment to its partners.  This financial pain is even more acute when United members redeem for expensive business and first-class tickets.  United’s solution to keep these costs down?  Make less partner seats available to its own loyal customers.

This is called Starnet filtering.  Starnet is the program used by all Star Alliance airlines to book flights on their alliance partners.  The filtering refers to the additional filter United puts on top of the already-limited award seats released by the other airlines.  Here’s an example:

Your blogger wanted to fly to Zurich on Swiss this past April.  Swiss had released several award seats in business class on the flight in question.  These seats could have been booked with miles from any program in Star Alliance, from Air Canada’s Aeroplan to Singapore Air’s KrisFlyer.  But when I called United to make a booking, they claimed the flight was not available as an award.  Why?  Because their program filtered this flight out to save United money.

This is not a story that I’m breaking.  It’s been documented in a couple of excellent pieces by Nicholas Kralev at the Washington Times.  It’s also been discussed quite a bit in the blogosphere and at FlyerTalk.  I think it’s important to keep the pressure up on United over this.  One of the key benefits of United’s program is supposed to be that members can redeem awards on any of its partners.  Now that United is making it increasingly difficult to do so, this amounts to nothing more than a bait-and-switch.  We’re promised destinations like Bali, Paris and Singapore, but when it comes time to make a booking, United’s penny-pinching policy stands between us frequent fliers and our hard-earned award tickets.

To add insult to injury, United lies to its own reservations agents about this.  Experts like me have ways to find out if an airline has released award seats on a given flight.  So when I call in, I know exactly what I’m talking about (”I” class in the case of that Swiss flight I was trying to book).  Reservations agents are told that – even though I can see “I” class available – they haven’t released that seat to United.  This is patently false.  I have confirmed with sources at Swiss that when they release award seats, every program in Star Alliance has equal access to those seats.

So what do we do about this?  Arguing with United reservations agents is pointless.  They have been lied to by their management and likely won’t believe you.  The most important thing you can do is to make other United fliers aware of this issue.  Reference this blog post and the articles linked herein.  You could also write the United executive offices and tell them you know exactly what they’re doing, and that you won’t be flying United again until they put a halt to these shenanigans.

Most importantly, be sure to stop posting those credit card, car rental and grocery miles to your United Mileage Plus account.  Since those companies have to pay United to buy the miles to give to you, that’s money in United’s pocket every time you choose to earn Mileage Plus miles with a partner.  Hit them where it hurts.