Survey Shows 2,900%+ More Dates Available Using Mileage Upgrades with American and United Over Using Free Mileage Awards

We’ve been telling you for 23 years that some airlines allocate many more seats for mileage upgrade awards, nowadays specifically American and United. So, if you’ve been around here for awhile, you’ve heard me talk a lot about little-used mileage upgrades—and this is for many reasons. In short, mileage upgrades are of most interest to two types of travelers:

1. Elite Status Travelers: When you redeem miles for a free ticket, you do not earn elite credit for the trip. Therefore, with all those miles elites accumulate when they fly, for the most part, they MUST redeem them for Mileage Upgrade Awards (or for other people). While FCF is not a big fan of chasing elite status, we understand that many have a different opinion and we concede that it does make sense for some.
2. Less-Flexible Travelers: It’s this special class of travelers we especially want to focus on here. To help you understand that using miles for upgrades opens doors that are often closed when trying to use miles for free travel, so we decided to illuminate it in a side-by-side date-availability chart.

Flying from Smaller (or Non-hub) Cities?

Smart travelers use the long-haul Business Class flight as a “bridge,” which, in FCF terms, means booking the premium seat on the international leg and using—if premium deals aren’t available—economy tickets to reach the long-haul departure city.

From the U.S., that means you should consider buying an economy through-fare ticket that includes the entire itinerary on one ticket. Then use miles just to upgrade from the gateway to your international destination’s gateway, at a minimum. If upgrade space is available on the domestic segments (meaning from your departure city to the gateway) grab it, as the cost is the same.

WHAT TO DO WHEN AN UPGRADE IS ONLY AVAILABLE ONE WAY?

American and United let you combine economy and Business Class fares, so you can upgrade the flight segment that has upgrade space and book the one that doesn’t in Business Class or even in Premium Economy.

Many of these tactics also work for anyone who can’t find a low Business Class fare and for those who don’t even have many American or United miles.

New Trends

United’s Flash mileage upgrade award space. Yes, you read correctly, not only are airlines get much better at flash fare sales, but now FCF is increasingly seeing United releasing flash mileage upgrade availability. What we mean by that is that one day a route could have 20+ days of availability for four passengers and then a day later all space is gone.

American’s lack of mileage upgrade award space. Over the last few months, FCF has also noticed that American is starting to release fewer and fewer mileage upgrade awards. A year ago American had a lot of dates with upgrade award space and now you cannot even find a handful of dates with upgrade space.

New trend? FCF hopes not. Stay tuned.

WHAT IF I DON’T HAVE ENOUGH MILES TO PLAY?

United: Don’t have any or enough United miles? No problem. Here are three ideas:

• Buy United miles when they go on sale (recent opportunity here).
• Marriott’s Travel Packages
• Transfer points from Chase to United.

American: Don’t have any or enough American miles? No problem. Two choices for you:

• Buy American miles when they go on sale (recent opportunity here).
• Transfer Starwood points (takes about two days), and you too can save big.