United Mileage Plus Win – US Airways Dividend Miles Fail
September 22nd, 2009 by KenricSo I’m going to Chicago soon and I have about 35,000 miles on United and US Airways which is good enough for a free ticket. Most mileage programs make you pay for the right to use your miles, so I thought I’d try to book the same flights using both and see what my results were.
The verdict (25,000 miles needed):
US Airways -$85 in fees
$50 – quick ticket fee (for booking within 14 days. This will be raised to $75 beginning next month)
$25 – award processing fee
$10 – I have no idea what for fee
United Airlines – $5 in fees
$5 – Award fee
United is the clear winner here. $85 in fees is about 1/3-1/4 the price of the ticket! I am suprised at how low the United fees are. In addition they had much more choices in flights that were eligible for only 25,000 miles. US Airways had 2 flights and both left around 6am. United had many flights scattered throughout the days.
I know that I’m going to change over to racking up United miles exclusively now. I rack up alot of miles on my ebiz credit cards and have been just scattering them among the two airlines.
BTW, I also have a few Delta Skymiles but there are even more ridiculous, they would have charged $155 in fees. Why even get miles with them?
Posted in General | 2 Comments »
Stumble it!
US Airways mileage plan stinks. I purchased a one way tix for 25k miles from Las Vegas to Atlanta, the next day, first class on the same flight dropped to 25k miles
A few supervisors later, no change without this fee and that fee, although we were still talking same mileage.
Guess the part that ticked me off the most is that there were empty first class seats on the flight.
Oh well!
By paul on Oct 2, 2009
I have a capital one no hassle rewards card (actually 2, one for personal expenses and one for biz expenses). They have no annual fee and I have yet to pay a fee for an airline ticket. They offer many airlines. I most recently used our miles for 4 nights at a resort and it was truly good and no hassle.
By Cynthia on Nov 10, 2009