Confused! Trying to use Miles from Europe
 

Sorry if I sound like an idiot. The story is that I've never cashed in miles before. Not even sure I can!

1. How do I do this if I'm traveling with my three kids together? Each has a separate account with different amounts of miles so how does that work?

2. I'm not allowed to check that this is a Mileage ticket until the purchase is made because I'm not in the U.S. Does that mean I have to actually buy the ticket completely on the site? How do I tell if I can even use them (have enough)? We all have different amounts because I was given 10,000 as compensation for a baggage incident and my son wasn't with us last year when we went.

I've tried googling how to redeem miles but all the questions have to do with U.S. travel. Can't find anything dealing with families together, and doing this while living outside the U.S.

FYI, I'm flying FRA to SFO with my son as an adult (13 yo) and daughters 11 & 8.

Sorry, but I’m also a little confused also. What does not being in the US have anything to do with using miles?

So, first thing I think we need to get clear is you can not “combine” all the miles from all your family members accounts and pool them together to get everyone a flight. One award flight (can be one way) needs to come out of just one MP account at a time. Again, this has nothing to do about being in the US or not.

You can’t take 10K miles out of 5 different accounts to get one 50K ticket. Hope I’m explaining this correctly.

It would help if you explained how many miles each member has, when you trying to go, and one way or round trip. I’m going to assume economy saver award tickets is what you are looking at, correct?

A good starting point is MileagePlus air awards & UA MP Travel and Upgrade Award Charts

From the second link, you will see FRA-SFO requires 60K miles for a round trip (RT) saver award.

The difference between starting in the USA or elsewhere are minimual to none. For all the kids, they will be considered an adult for mileage award tickets. Only a lapchild (under 2) is different.

As AZjohns mentions, each ticket must be funded from a single account and not from multiple accounts. If that is not possible but you have a enought total miles, there are some tricks (but will not mention them at this time to keep things from getting too complex -- let's us know if that is needed).

http://united.com shows availability for awards. Click "Award Travel."

how many mi in each account?.....these are united mi ?

ua has 1 way awards, so if there isn't enough in 1 acct for rt, you could get a 1 way& do 3 1 ways from another....

so post the amounts....someone will verify if you have enough & if not, what can be done....

when is the trip?

edit to add....if any of the 4 of y'all haven't had activity for a while, check the mi expiration dates....

I'll check the mileage rates. Good to know that one-way is possible. I think only I have enough for anything.

No, I wasn't looking to combine anything.

How do you book a family together if they have different accounts?

Also, why is it different from outside the U.S.? Still can't figure that out. Is it a tax thing??

You book N separate reservations and hope that SHARES doesn't decide to randomly drop some of your segments. Combining PNRs is not possible (despite frequent questions here demanding that it is).

It's not different. Various countries simply impose different taxes, typically on departures. A FRA-SFO-FRA roundtrip is going to be very similar to a SFO-FRA-SFO roundtrip tax/mile-wse.

You have mentioned this twice, could you be more specific about what you are seeing or not seeing?
Not aware of anything that should be different.

You will need at least 30k miles in an account for a one way economy ticket. Also it is a lot more cost efficient that you can book as many round trip tickets as possible.
You will need to book them separate if they come out of separate accounts.
So assuming you have 60k, and 2 of your children have 30k each then you could get 2 round trip award tickets (assuming availability) and would need to buy 2 revenue seats.
Look up the individual mile balances on all your accounts and post them here and if you know dates post them as well.
No difference starting in Europe or the US. The online search for award tickets works like a revenue search. Just start on the main United page and search for a flight but before you click search change the selector from "price" to "Award Travel".