42k UA miles. Need 49.5k for flight. Best way?
 

My son living in Canada has 42k UA miles but needs 49.5k for booking an int’l flight. An additional 8k miles are costing ~US$300. The cash price of the ticket is around $1k. I have only around 5k UR in my Chase account after booking a business class in the same flight for around 88k UR (we’re flying together out of the US).

Since he doesn’t want to spend $300, is there any cheap way for him to get an extra 7.5k miles soon?

The only option I can think of is applying for a Chase Ink to get the 100k SUB but that would take a long time and the award flight may be gone by then.

Another option is him booking a dummy flight to take advantage of the award accelerator and purchasing 15k miles for $375. But again, he doesn’t want to spend that.

Can someone suggest what to do?

You’ve pretty much covered the options.

Is this all UA operated flights? Money + Miles - The perfect pair to get you there

What is the "Book with Money and Miles" option ?

It’s an award flight operated by AC and then Ethiopian Airlines DTW-YYZ-ADD-BOM.

I tried the Money+Miles option but for that, I need to uncheck “search for award flights” and the result doesn’t show the flight I’m looking for.

Money+miles is presently only for all UA operated flight itins.
And an itin with no UA operated or codeshare / JV flights will not show up for cash purchase on ua,com.

Argh. So what to do?

You could transfer miles from another MP account for about $120 -- less money but not a great deal as the other person loses the use of the miles.

A take one of the options you listed.
The award option is decent and will not stay around.

It is what it is.

Award accelerator offers are dynamic. Shorter flights tend to get smaller offers. He could try booking various city pairs looking for something closer to the 7.5K he needs. At the moment, I have an offer on MSO-AUS for 8K miles for $181.

Pretty much anything else is going to be (a) much slower, (b) more expensive, or (c) both.

It’s 42k miles plus $300 or $1,000. Pick one. Quickly.

so he needs to book a more expensive itinerary then cancel it within 24 hours?

How does the award price originating at YQG, rather than DTW? Or originating at YYZ, without the DTW-YYZ segment?

There are ground transportation options for getting from Detroit (or Windsor, ON) to Toronto.

It’s identical.. 49.5k miles

If the present offer is 15K miles, try a shorter, one way flight.to get a smaller offer. It is going to be roughly 2 cpm and will be hard to get just the exact miles, so, expect $175, maybe $200 best case.

How do you see the award accelerator without booking a flight? I don’t even see it after booking one. Here are some screenshots.

https://cimg0.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...c6dbdb242.jpeg
https://cimg2.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...1158e8cc0.jpeg

I tried MSO-AUS July 19 and only see these travel options:


https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...be694bc47.jpeg