Cash and miles on a RT ticket?
 

I looked through older posts and could not find an answer, so sorry if this has been discussed before.

I only have miles for a one-way flight, but not for the return one. How do I buy the return at the "both ways" rate and not the "one way" rate, when using miles to get the other way? Thanks

You can not mix a mileage ticket with a normal cash ticket.

You might consider purchasing the needed miles for the return. The Award Accelerate seems to be 1.9 cpm for most and can lead to a reasonable purchase cost (but is a bit more complex than the more expensive PurhasePersonal Miles)

You can't do that. On UA (and AA), you can use miles for a one-way award ticket at half the mileage of RT. For the return, you could use AA miles on the same basis, if you have miles with AA. But if you wish to buy a one-way ticket with $, you'll pay the one-way rate on whichever airline you choose to book. For some routes, that will be half the RT fare in $. But for other routes, especially those involving transatlantic flights, one-way fares in $ are more expensive than a RT. Check carefully before you commit your miles.

Thanks a lot, this is really helpful. We'll have to look into buying some extra miles, unless we get lucky with some saver awards ;)

Also need to check this Award Accelerate, I am not familiar with it.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something, but your original post used the word "I", while the post quoted above reads "we". If two people are travelling and each has enough miles for a one-way award, the best procedure may be to obtain two one-way award seats for Passenger A, while Passenger B purchases a RT ticket with $.

JPG, it's 2 of us, and we both have some miles, plus some UR points that can go to either account. Between the 2 of us, we have enough for 1 RT and just one way for the other. So I guess buying some miles is what we need to do.
But thanks for your suggestion, it really makes sense, and somehow I was not thinking of it.

What's the routing you're looking at? Just buying the one-way fare might not be too bad, depending on the city pair and travel dates.

JFK to Johannesburg. And from your question I see...I need to price out and compare all possible options. Thanks

For the random dates I checked, the lowest RT fare JFK-Johannesburg is $1178.00. The lowest one-way fare flying to Johannesburg is $3166.00. I did not check one-way travel Johannesburg-JFK.

The return is likely to be quite a bit cheaper. I did it for ~$650 o/w in April 2013. But that's not on UA. It was on TK with QR and EK offering similar fares.

Thanks - my dates are not out yet, so I will need to wait a little bit longer. We really want the non-stop, so that will definitely add to the price. ANy idea, when buying miles, do they post right away? Or is there a delay?

I checked on the UA website only. For the dates I checked, the nonstop was the lowest fare. No doubt that's not always the case.

Aug 2015 fares....RT is almost $ 9K. That's a lot of $$$...did I mention that we want business? I think I missed that.