Update 5/29/23: This has now expanded to more locations. Dans Deals has the full details here.
United has just made a huge no notice award devaluation and prices have increased dramatically. Prices seem to have increased by a minimum of 33% and up to 50% in some cases on transatlantic flights. Partner awards have also increased in price.
Today I see I need 55k miles to Tokyo one way. It use to be 35k miles so increased by 57%!
same to Southeast Asia, used to be 44k on partners but today is 60.5k!
Sure, 60.5k is the partner award price with saver space available. Example is SIN-LAX in September on SQ.
The 100k price you’re seeing is United non-saver award space. Interestingly, it looks like if there is saved space available on United it can be less miles than it was before the devaluation (used to be 40k, now saver space on United SIN-SFO can be had for 39k)
Thanks for the head’s up!
It sucks I just transferred UR points to United thinking I would use it for a SEA-U.S flight. I just transferred it a week ago and it took 5 days to process. But now with the higher mile fares.. I don’t have enough to book the flight I need anymore 🙁 bummer
the 90,000 mile quest offer begins to make up for the devaluation. Lets see if they improve other offers.
And then the 90000 offer goes away but the deval stays. This pricing psychology is so predictable!
so grab the 90,000 right away i guess.
a month ago, i was on the fence whether to transfer UR points to marriott with 50% bonus or to hold on for future use on united.
ended up transferring to marriott and very glad i did.
Lol Marriott devaluation is worse than United
I finally managed to redeem my Marriott points for 1.3 cpp. 3 star hotel kind of in the middle of nowhere. Took me 3 years to find nearly anything halfway decent. Never trying to accumulate Marriott points ever again
well, did you read the “50% bonus” part?
Lol. I would have just used the travel portal you would have gotten more value
This is always why I tell people who hoard miles on a flight rewards program – USE THEM QUICKLY! Besides the fact that you are losing out on bank interest had you elected to get those points as cash (should you have chosen to take miles from credit cards as cash back vs transferring them to an airline rewards system), the airlines alllllllways devalue the miles. And the devaluation comes in one of three ways, or all three. 1) Costs of flights go up making you have to use more miles, 2) value per mile gets decreased making you have to use more miles, 3) quality of the flight goes down meaning you get less at the end.
My colleague has been hoarding United miles with the hope of becoming a million mile member (he’s close – i think he’s at 800,000 something?). Great job. But by the time he is ready to retire from work and travel the world with those 1,000,000 miles, he will get so much less than had he used them progressively over time. He’ll never know how much value he lost, of course…it is impossible to measure.
Well from this he will know he’s lost AT LEAST 33-50%. So by the time he’s ready to use the 1,000,000 miles they’ll probably only be worth 100-200k in what it used to be worth.
I’m perfectly happy rolling up SUBs with ROIs of 15-30% (taking into account Y1 AF + my own points valuation). True, the pots of miles/points I’ve accumulated will be devalued over time, but a) they give me flexibility across multiple airlines/hotels for any given trip, plus b) a stash available in an emergency if issues arise on travel (illness, rail strike) & I need a hotel for another night or three. And unlike the cheapest revenue airfares/room rates, it’s all cancelable with no penalty.
I can also freely gift travel to family or book alternative trips/stays—except on UA, which is good at catching impossible overlaps—when my own future plans are uncertain.
Also, with some judicious searching I can fly TATL in J at a cpp yield well above any baseline nominal miles valuation you care to use.
If cashback sparks joy, you do you. I won’t kink-shame. But for the average traveler flying to Europe or Asia in bidness class, racking up miles/points is by far the better path to happiness. United could cut MP valuation by another 33% or more, which they undoubtedly will, and I’d still be making bank.
BTW, you’re half right about your colleague: he should be taking trips starting yesterday & not just piling them up for 5 or 10 years down the road.
Me personally, I do love airline miles. I just redeemed 60,000 AA miles on three economy tickets from Colombia that gave me a value of $0.0128/mile, or close to $770 in value (much higher than the $600 it would have been for cash back when I got them from the AA Barclays card). So I’m not going to be hypocritical here and say I never do miles. I just try to use them quickly and judiciously so I don’t lose value. With that being said, I am sitting on 43,000 United miles that I haven’t yet found an ability to use.
“Problem is that doing business class gets you fewer flights. So do you want more flights or more value per flight?”
¿Porque no los dos? I want a flat bed on TATL overnights & am fine with cattle class on the way back. Also, my upcoming flight in Y out of FRA is yielding a hair above 5cpm, ergo more flights + more value. (Yes, there are less expensive revenue fares than the one I’m using for comparison, but I foolishly insist on taking the 9-hr nonstop rather than the budget itineraries that literally take 3x as long.)
With that award, booked pre-deval, now costing ~1/3 more, future trips would instead yield “only” ~3.7cpm. Obviously I’d rather United not devalue my miles, but I’ll sleep just fine—and keep on happily parking my butt in the sky—even under the new regime.
“not nearly as good as doing business/first which can net you $0.02/mile or more”
Well, assuming you personally would have paid the ticket price. Else it’s what you would have paid, or preferred to take as cash instead of the flight. If you’d prefer $1000 cash and a $500 economy flight instead of a $5000 business ticket, you can’t claim you get $5000 out of the points.
False. I wouldn’t shell out $5K cash for flat-bed TATL J, but I refuse to do eastbound/overnight TATL in Y. If I can have the thing I want for miles & not cash (& there aren’t reasonable alternatives at lower cash cost), the price of a revenue J fare is precisely the value of what my miles are buying.
Earn and burn. I book six United International flights with miles and I think I had 22k miles left when the devaluation happened.
Having 1M miles is not the same as being a million miler. I’ve had well over 1M miles in my account. I’m now a million miler which means flying 1M paid miles. Happy to have used all my miles and now to be lifetime gold.
What can go wrong when you hire someone from Comcast to lead ops? I have Comcast and they are the worst provider I have dealt with, trying to sneak in fees and such. No customer service.
Thanks to one particular club that focuses on getting HARD. Anyone that participates in this scheme should go to jail. They fasely generate lots of UA points from fake purchases that alert UA HQ. That’s why we can’t have nice things.
Care to expand on this? What’s HARD?
Not only have there been devaluations but now a route that I was interested in that used to be direct every day is only showing 1 stop layover routes if paying with miles, but with $ the direct routes show.
I had some non-stop flights booked with miles, which were just changed by the “friendly skies” to connecting flights.
@JohnAnon wow no way! You should complain and have united rebook your flight to a direct flight.
Yup it is the new normal….asked to me to fly to to ORD then IAH to connect the long haul int”l flight instead of a short nonstop flight to IAH. If you want the nonstop segment, you will have to pay more miles.
Crazy. I was looking at HNL to NRT flights and if paying with dollars there’s direct flights with ANA both directions but if you switch it to miles then only 2 united flights per day with layover in GUM appears. Shady stuff.
yup…I had to pay way more miles just for the nonstop short flight from TUL to IAH which I had always got it in the past for my award tickets.
That’s on ANA, not United. ANA releases very limited inventory to their partners for award booking. If ANA isn’t willing to take the points booking from United, then United can’t book it directly with miles.
according to other sources united has rolled back some of these increases. Specifcally business class on partner airiines. Im not sure if its ok to post a link?
Japan just ditched covid restrictions 2 weeks ago. Im sure everyone is herding over there.
it’s been ditched since last September
+ article says transatlantic lol. was also in Tokyo a few weeks ago. got Aadvantage 35k miles for ORD/HND via Japan airlines but some messed up layover in NYC.
Needed 3 covid shots or a test until may 7. Now no test no shots.
that’s strange
Belinda I visited Japan in October, 2022 and March, 2023.. and never once asked for any test or vaccine proof
@Sunshine You forgot. You were supposed to upload your proof of vaccination on the airline portal before flying to Japan.
Lucky me, used all my United miles to Japan last month.
you’re right I forgot.. I only had to do that one time in October 2022.. but never asked about my vaccine proof from anyone on the trips
i got vaccinated in December 2020 and January 2021 so feels like a distant memory..
Everyone should have their shots anyways at this point if they’re traveling
My lucky day. I recently burned up all my miles to get my ass to Australia.
Same here and burned a stash of Delta to get back just before the Thrifty Traveller blog blew up the MEX loophole.
Serious? When did he do that?
People are just mad and want to blame someone. The MEX option was posted by various folks over time, and there’s fake rage about it.
His post was absolutely the trigger for it.
May 9. It didn’t last two weeks after that.
https://thriftytraveler.com/news/points/book-business-class-delta-skymiles/
it’s hilarious that a “loophole” is just a standard fare between 2 international cities that aren’t crowded US hubs
It was 95K J SYD-MEX (and some other Mexican cities) on D1. Not a “standard fare” redemption on Delta these days.