I am a 1K on UA; my wife and I are planning to take a RTW trip, leaving around June. I have accumulated about 500K in UA miles, and would like to blow through these miles before spending anything on flights. My confusion stems on how far we can get using miles alone.

Most of the threads seem deal with the round the world fares available through Star Alliance, not booking a bunch of OW Star Alliance tickets through UA. I just have no idea how far we might be able to get on 500K frequent flier miles, since the only calculators I have seen deal with RT tickets, not OW (maybe OW tickets are always 1/2 the miles?).

Any thoughts or references anyone can give me to get started? General thoughts of an itinerary are as follows: Denver, Tokyo, Beijing, Hong Kong, Hanoi, Bangkok, Kathmandu, New Dehli/Bombay, Nairobi/Dar es Salaam, Cairo, Istanbul, Athens, Frankfurt, Denver.

Many thanks in advance for any guidance anyone can provide!

Great post. Welcome to FlyerTalk.

I will be watching this thread for responses also. I have amassed over a million miles because I have been unable to redeem them any time I have tried.

Well, I'll respond to my own post to get things started.. I missed the UA 'Round the World' award option, since it is listed at the bottom of their page.. http://www.united.com/page/article/0,6722,1142,00.html. Anyway, per this, it is 200,000 miles for economy travel. There are no specifics, though, as to the number of miles you can travel, etc...

I suppose I'll have to call UA to get details.. if anyone has any information, would be appreciated!

Already asked on UA forum, which is IMO the best place for the question about UA Mileage Plus award rules.

I called UA and the agent told me the 200k award was for a maximum of 35k miles on Star Alliance in coach. All regular blackouts and award restrictions apply. She said they counted miles point to point, meaning a direct flight from SEA to LGA through ORD would be calculated SEA-ORD + ORD-LGA.

She didn't seem very knowledge on the subject, just trying to find in the computer and regurgitate but very polite

If you do a search, you will find previous threads here in which it is
shown that the RTW REWARD options are not very economical.

While a PAID RTW is a cheap method of flying, and is usually cheaper than
a simple America-Asia round trip, a REWARD RTW is usually more expensive
than various reward round-trips.

As I wrote in a previous thread, for ALMOST the same miles as a RTW
reward, you can book 3 return reward tickets that would in effect give
you 2 RTW trips instead of one.