United Travel Hacks

Note: This is the promised first newsletter focused on travel hacking topics. These will come periodically just like the manufactured spend posts.

Let's talk about how we can make best use of United awards and TravelBanks. With a bit of legwork, we can make both much more flexible than their rules imply.

Award Ticketing Flexibility

United's award change and cancellation policies in the post COVID world are much more lax than they were before, but there's still a redeposit fee charged for everyone but United 1K elites if you want to cancel a ticket within 30 days. There's an easy way for all of us to be a 1K Elite (for award ticket cancelations) though, and it's easy to see the loophole with the following two rules:

1. There is no fee for making changes to award tickets
2. Fees only apply to cancelations for tickets scheduled to depart in the next 30 days

See the loophole? If you have an award ticket that you want to cancel within the next month, just reschedule it to be more than 30 days out and then cancel it. Easy.

Travel Bank Rule Breaking

Many of us are cashing out our American Express Platinum and Business Platinum airline credits, PenFed Pathfinder credits, BoA Premium Visa credits, etc. via United TravelBank. (In fact, my balance is growing uncomfortably large, I have enough for a pair of round-trip business class tickets with some room to spare.) TravelBank does have one major drawback though: It can only be used for travel on United or United Express flights, and some promotional TravelBank credits expire relatively quickly. You can get around both issues:

1. Find a similarly priced United flight, pay for it with TravelBank
2. Wait 24 hours
3. Cancel the flight and refund to a Future Flight Credit
4. Book the flight you want with the Future Flight Credit

A caveat: Future Flight Credits expire in one year of original booking, so they're only good for extending promotional credit for a year.

Happy hacking!