United Polaris awards wide-open to cardholders & elites | Coffee Break Ep120 | 8-26-26

Frequent Miler on the Air

This episode of Frequent Miler on the Air explores United Airlines' expanded Polaris award availability for cardholders and elite members, h

Key takeaways

• United Polaris Saver awards are now widely available to cardholders and elite members, with nearly 2,324 return flights from Europe to North America accessible for cardholders.
• Non-cardholders have only 50 return flight options, making saver award access virtually impossible without a United credit card or elite status.

Main topics

• United Polaris awards
• Saver award pricing

Notable quotes

"If you're a cardholder, I found 783 of them available. For non-cardholders, though, five. Ouch!"

Conclusion

The episode concludes that having a United credit card or elite status dramatically improves access

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:01) This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. Speaker 2 (0:11) Today's Coffee Break, United Polaris Awards wide open to cardholders and elite members. Welcome to Frequent Milers Coffee Break, where we focus on a single topic related to miles and points. Each Speaker 3 (0:24) Coffee Break is limited to 20 minutes or less or Speaker 2 (0:27) your money back. On today's Coffee Break, we're going to talk about how just by having the right United credit card or United Elite status gives you access to an amazing amount of business class international award space. Yeah, and Speaker 3 (0:42) remember, if you want to jump ahead to something or you want to find out more about what's in this episode, don't forget to expand the description box for full details. And wherever you're watching or listening, don't forget to like this and subscribe, enable notifications. We appreciate all that stuff. Ryanair made me throw out my coffee this morning. I flew Ryanair today and they said no coffee on board. I was like, what do you mean? I can't bring coffee. If it was in my thermos, I could have, but not in a cup. So I am caffeine less, which means that hopefully, Greg, you're going to have a lot. to say about this United cardholder availability, because not only am I caffeine-less, but I'm also United Speaker 2 (1:17) cardless. Yes. And with Nick just off of vacation, you can give him a break for not maybe being 100 % up to speed on this topic as well. Let me back up a little bit and say, in the title of the show, I said Polaris Awards Wide Open. What is Polaris? Nick, I think you could explain that one, right? Speaker 3 (1:42) That one I can explain properly. So Polaris is what United calls their business class, similar to Delta calls theirs Delta One or American calls theirs flagship business. So Polaris is just their word for business class. You hear miles and points people talk about Polaris. We're usually talking about like true flatbed seats. So Polaris space, we're talking about flatbed seats like to Europe or transcontinental flights in general. Speaker 2 (2:09) Yeah. OK. And then the other thing is saver awards. What is a saver award? Those are Speaker 3 (2:17) the cheap ones, the ones I like. So the lowest level pricing. Now, United doesn't actually have an award chart anymore, but we have an idea as to what the lowest level of pricing is for business class awards to the various regions of the world. And so Saver represents that kind of low price. Speaker 2 (2:35) Right, right. Okay. So I did some research. last week and was stunned by what I found. But the short answer is that there is better, safer, Polaris award availability for both cardholders and elite members. And this was promised to us by United in the beginning of the year that they said it would start April 2nd. And Now we've actually looked at the numbers, and it's actually remarkable. In addition to getting better saver award availability, you also get a discount on top of that. So, for example, having a credit card, having a United credit card will give you a 10 % discount off of these awards. And having both... a credit card and elite status will give you 15 % off. So you can save even more. But the biggest savings overall is going from non-saver awards to saver. So let me give you an example. As we're recording this today, non-saver pricing. Let's say you're looking for business class flights to Europe. Regular pricing that's not saver, you're going to be looking at $200,000 or more generally. Now it varies because there's no fixed chart for what. a non-saver award is, but that's very typical. Saver pricing, 80,000 points. This is one way. So you can see right there the advantage of being able to get access to these saver awards is absolutely huge from a pricing point of view. If you have a credit card and you get saver pricing, that gives you the 10 % discount. So that 80,000 point award goes down to 72,000. And if you also have elite status, That gives you a 15 % discount, the card plus elite status. So then the award becomes $68,000. Interestingly, if you're an elite member without a United card, while you do get access to the Saver award space, you don't get a discount. So you're going to still be spending $80,000 for those Saver awards. Wow. I Speaker 3 (4:52) mean, either of those is a huge, any of the, those options is a huge difference over what people would look at ordinarily. And, and. People that just are casually into miles and points that just have miles in one program like United, I'm sure are used to seeing that 200,000 point price price point. I see that all the time when I search on United dot com. So, I mean, saving 120 or 130,000 miles per passenger. I mean, that adds up pretty quickly. But but when they said that this was going to happen. I was very skeptical as to whether that was actually going to be true. I mean, or is this going to be like Speaker 2 (5:30) a one-off here and there flights Speaker 3 (5:31) that nobody wants Speaker 2 (5:32) anyway? Right. Right. And, uh, the other thing was like, are they just going to get rid of non cardholder awards and, but keep the same number of, of, uh, awards that they had before, but only for cardholders. So, um, So I did some research and I used Seats.Aero, which is an award search tool that lets you look across like a whole year of award space. Now, for United and many programs, that's really 11 months because that's how far out they have awards available. And Seats.Aero has recently added the ability to see results based on as if you're a cardholder. or as if you have elite status or both. And that's what enabled, made it possible for me to do this research. And to kind of simplify things, I only looked at nonstop awards that United flew themselves, would fly themselves. Because like the expanded award space also applies to mixed operator. flights where like maybe one leg is United, but others are on other carriers. But narrowing down to those, narrowing down to just nonstop United was much easier. So I could get really solid numbers out of this whole thing. Okay. So let's talk about what I found. First of all, the title of this show, you know, gives it