IN / Family Trip
 

Upcoming family trip (3 pax). 1k member with United co-brand card. Found 3x business saver availability on IAH-SYD for 80k/person using my account.

I have 160k miles for use in account.
My wife has 80k. She's silver, will be gold in two weeks. Does not have card.

I can see business saver availability; she cannot.

Any suggestions on how to use her miles to complete the booking?

e.g., add her as an 'additional cardholder' (would this work?). Or, does she see the extra avaibility when she becomes UAGold? Or, should I 'award hold' the 3x on my account and then try to convince the agent to draw the third ticket from hers account? Open to ideas...

Thanks!

Expanded saver business (IN) is for Plat and higher. No card gives access.

And the 80K is almost certainly an IN price, not a JN price.

OP: Unless you have some other currency that you can convert to MileagePlus miles, the best I can suggest is to get two mileage tickets from your account, and then buy one ticket and pay miles + copay to upgrade it, using the miles from her account. If there's IN availability, there should also be PZ availability, which is what's used for upgrade space. Buy the award tickets first, but try to do both transactions as simultaneously as possible.

It's not as good of a deal as three award tickets, but you can't transfer 80K miles, and the transfer charges would be extremely expensive to boot. You could buy 80K miles, but you'd pay a lot more to buy the miles than you would to book the flight and upgrade it.

There are two forms of enhanced Business award availability

IN - Business Saver award -- availability to elites, Plat or higher. No credit cardholder access. Note it is rare for IN to be greater than I space but it does happen

JN - Business "Everyday" award -- more expense in miles than I/IN but essentially always available, open for elites and card cardholders. Others have access to ZN instead. JN tracks J and ZN tracks Z

who has access to ZN?

Anyone who's willing to burn an obscene quantity of miles.

https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/unit...ets-ua-24.html

Anyone, but if Z0, then ZN0.
However, elites and cardholders also have JN access.
The mileage rates are the same for both, so in essence elites / cardholders have last seat access; others do not.

Last seat access? I thought [guaranteed] last seat access on awards (either economy or business) was gone a little while ago - part of one of the last couple of rounds of cutbacks (although I admit I haven’t paid particularly close attention to whether last seat access typically exists or not, but at least theoretically, they don’t have to offer it).

Hold a res for one of the seats with your account, then call and use her account to pay.

Not sure if technically allowed, but I've never had an issue with it.

I’d call 1k line and have them book all three from the two accounts

No, last-seat access is still a guaranteed benefit for both credit card holders and premier members. It's implemented through JN (business) and YN (economy). Other passengers are restricted to ZN (business) and HN (economy) for Everyday awards.

IN3 I0 is very rare. is there at least I1? You could buy 1 ticket from the one account and then 2 more from your account.

I've seen it but agree IN3 I1 would be more likely.

IN leading I has been getting more and more common in my experience. Agree IN3 I1 is more common, but IN3 I0 would not surprise me.

It's probably worth calling the 1K line and seeing if they will split-tender the miles into the IN space. Not really a policy thing, but they might be nice.