United Copies American This Time With Big Premium Cabin Mileage Bonuses as a Stopgap Until They Go Revenue-Based

United is copying Delta’s revenue-based mileage earning for flights that started January 1, but it’s taking MileagePlus until March 1 to get it up and running.

In the meantime, American isn’t going revenue-based. They’re keeping the principle that one mile equals one miles. Instead they’re competing for high revenue passengers by giving those flyers a ton of bonus miles.

That leaves United with an interesting strategic gap. In January and February they give out far fewer miles to paid premium cabin customers than either Delta or American. (Meanwhile, of course, those miles are worth less also.)

So they’ve decided to copy American this time for that two month period, and offer bonus miles for premium cabin flights between today and February 28. And their bonus chart looks a whole lot like American’s.

No registration required. “Long haul” means 3000 miles or more plus United’s p.s. flights between New York JFK and Los Angeles/San Francisco. Flights on Air Canada, ANA, Austrian, Brussels Airlines, Copa, Lufthansa and Swiss count in addition to flights on United.


About Gary Leff

Gary Leff is one of the foremost experts in the field of miles, points, and frequent business travel - a topic he has covered since 2002. Co-founder of frequent flyer community InsideFlyer.com, emcee of the Freddie Awards, and named one of the "World's Top Travel Experts" by Conde' Nast Traveler (2010-Present) Gary has been a guest on most major news media, profiled in several top print publications, and published broadly on the topic of consumer loyalty. More About Gary »

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  1. Still not an incentive to keep loyal to UA after all these years. I cancelled $1900 worth of plane tickets (refundable fares) on them in the last week & am so far happy with my few weeks on AA…upgrades cleared, flights left on time, RJ product wasn’t filthy/unsanitary feeling.

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