Originally Posted by
redtop43
I hope this is the place to post this, rather than in the credit card forum.
I do the credit card bonus points thingy for most of my travel needs/issues, mostly oriented around American Express points transferred to Air Canada (my wife lives in Canada, me in the USA, so we need a lot of Canada-USA tickets) with a smaller amount of Chase Ultimate Rewards points, and I have a decent balance on Delta as well.
My wife travels every August to Romania to see her family. I am thinking about trying to accumulate United miles specifically for that trip.
So here are my questions:
1) I think the current offer for the UA Explorer card is 60K if you already have an active MP account. Can we open an account, transfer a minimal number of miles from the Chase UR acccount, and thereby qualify for the 60K bonus?
2) I think United miles do expire. Can we keep them active by making a small transfer from Chase UR just before the expiration date?
3) What is saver availability like? She would usually be flying RDU-OTP (Bucharest) in early August, returning in late August, she has a window of about 5 days on each leg and would usually stay 15-20 days.
Thanks for any help.
Start at your last question and work forward (because if United doesn't work out for an award, it renders the rest of the question irrelevant). Check for availability of your flights, for which you don't need assistance here. Just go to united.com and search for award flights. It's pretty easy to do. If you don't see anything at first, do a search for star alliance airports in europe and see what's close and check those. For rail connections, use bahn.de.
United miles don't expire as long as you have any activity, and that includes earning them through credit card use.
Don't know about the 60k bonus but it sounds kinda backward; usually you get the biggest bonus if you're not a continuing customer. But could be true. I've got a stack of Explorer Card offers on the table in the kitchen; guess I should check!