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British Airways and Lufthansa have been charging Business Class users to pick their seats for a while now, so we knew it was only a matter of time before United's management flipped out that they were "leaving money on the table" and followed suit.  Plenty of sites are covering this latest enshittifcation , but long story short,  the new "Base" Polaris: includes 1 free checked bag instead of 2 requires you to pay to choose your seat has no ability to upgrade to the new Polaris Suite has United Club access, but no Polaris lounge access has no free ticket changes or refunds available We all know that this isn't going to magically create a cheap Polaris seat for those types who "just want a bed in the sky and don't want any of that other fancy stuff." While that's how this un-bundling is always presented -- "we're providing choices!" -- the reality is that the crappy new product will have the old price and you'll have to pay ...

So odd that on the very same day the United's CEO said he never eats the food on a long flight (because " hyyyyyydraaaation and sleeeeeeep ") they also announce a partnership with Chef's Table to bring legendary chefs' cooking to Polaris .  Of course my former-Californian soul jumped for joy when it heard the name Nancy Silverton, but then I remembered the old Anthony Bourdain quote " There's almost never a good reason to eat on a plane… Much better to show up in a new place and be hungry and eat at even a little street stall than arrive gassy and bloated, full, flatulent, hungover." And while I generally agree with that, ANA First exists as proof it can be done.  This has been tried  many times before , both in the 'celebrity chef as airline chef' format and in the 'we'll bring you a Shake Shack burger in the sky' format. I'm absolutely convinced that Nancy and her peers could design something delicious for in-flight dini...

It looks like United is launching a whole new sub-fleet within its A32X planes and calling them "Coastliners." Near as all the experts can tell, these Coastliners are a dedicated set of premium-configured planes to run between the coasts' largest and most profitable cities. The name seems a bit Amtrak-y, which immediately gives me fears that they'll be chronically delayed, but I digress… Back in the day (starting in 2004) United had fleet of 757s badged as "Premium Service," and boy do we (and many other plane nerds) have a some fond memories of its legendary, infinite-legroom Row 9. The whole thing sorta fell apart back in 2015 when they started moving heaps of their JFK traffic to EWR (they eventually left JFK altogether). This was right about the time that JetBlue stunned the American aviation market by launching its lie-flat Mint product, the first domestic planes with beds and closing door suites.  I'll be honest, the rise of Mint coupled with Uni...

UPDATE: According to some folks on the Reddit United Airlines forum, people whose home airport is Newark were targeted for this promotion due to the many operational problems United experienced there in 2025 (ATC moved to Pennsylvania, tarmac construction, etc.) UPDATE 2 (13 feb): You're never going to believe  this, but I got an email today telling me they were also doubling my starter PQPs from 900 to 1800!  22 Jan 2026 I just got back from our annual holiday trip to Australia and I'm sitting here at 7am jet lagged and slowly combing through 2 months of low-priority emails and notice there's a United Airlines survey to earn 500 miles.  Fine, I'll do it. "Did our recent email informing you that we've decided to extend your Platinum status through 2027 have any impact on yo---" WAIT, WHAT?!  Dig through my inbox and sure enough, on the 16th of January:  …and it's not just the status, I have 40 shiny new PlusPoints sitting in my account! (My flight home...

Tim is flying back to Sydney next week and has a PlusPoints upgrade to Polaris pending. He's United Gold and flying in Premium Economy, so his chances are as good as we can make them. Normally the upgrade list doesn't become visible until ≈72 hours before your flight. In years past, I've occasionally called in a favor from a friend at United to get a peek at this list early so we could make some alternate arrangements if our chances were looking grim.  I'd heard United was going to roll out a new Beta feature to allow early viewing of the upgrade list and sure enough, Tim was selected for inclusion in the Beta. Last week he was looking at his flight in the United app on his phones and saw this: He's flying out in 8 days and there are 7 seats left. He's 4th in line for those 7 seats. Last week he was 4th in line for 9 seats. Keeping in mind that all airlines these days will do anything to earn incremental revenue, everyone in the back of the plane will get some ...

United announced 3 big crappy changes which are all general devaluations of their miles and their overall program. I never personally used the Excursionist Perk , nor the instant full-fare coach upgrades, but I get why people are sad they're going away. For us, the news that Mileage Upgrade Awards are becoming dynamically priced later this year sorta blows a hole in our current, Australia-heavy strategy .  As I'd already mentioned, the per-leg cost of: a $1000-ish coach fare  + $300-$450  co-pay + 30,000 miles   was already starting to add up, but if I'm suddenly paying, say, 60,000 miles per leg for an upgrade instead of 30,000 then it's time to look at other options.  No good points game lasts very long (check my similar gravy-train farewell from 2014 ), and while I'm grateful for the 2 years of togetherness (and back health!) it's afforded us, it's time to start looking around at other options. For my next Sydney visit in June, I decided to follow a Sea...

United announced some major updates to Polaris Business Class yesterday and it's crazy to think this blog has been around long enough to have my thoughts on Polaris ' birth nearly 10 years ago. Re-reading that post makes the launch of this new seat seem fairly trivial in comparison to that: the branding, the service, the lounges are all up and running now. Other than the door, the difference between the new seat and the old seat is fairly small - a lot smaller than the difference between the first Polaris seat and the Business Class seats that preceded it.  LOL a worker at the BK Navy Yard leaked the big Polaris reveal 24 hours early So yes, they're going to roll out an off-the-shelf seat (with doors!) that's been in use by Qatar and Hawaiian for a while now. A seasonal flavor will get added to the ice cream sundae cart. There'll be a new self-serve snack area. A bunch of the middle seats will have double-bed features ( including a shared mattress pad ). The new p...

Ooh! United just announced several new (and useful!) routes in the Pacific SFO – Adelaide . I still haven't been. I could definitely see meeting up with Tim there at the beginning of a visit if we found a cheap fare there. Honestly, though, I thought the same thing with Brisbane and I've still never done that. You figure these routes will help pull people off of the Sydney/Melbourne flights who would have been connecting so that leaves more seats to Sydney for us. They're claiming that SFO-Adelaide will turn 51 destinations into 1-stops versus their current 2-stops. I can't imagine 51 places you can get to directly from ADL that you can't from SYD, but ok.  SFO/LAX – Hong Kong – Bangkok and SFO/LAX – Hong Kong– Saigon . I'm paraphrasing a bit here because they're technically only launching the intra-Asian legs, but they're timed conveniently to line up with United flights arriving from SFO/LAX . I would have preferred direct service rather than a HKG ...

In late 2023 I subscribed to a new service called Seats.aero that constantly scrapes airline websites looking for real, bookable points and upgrade deals. They have a slick United PlusPoints upgrade finder which I quickly discovered also finds instantly-bookable Mileage Upgrade Awards (MUA). Given how expensive it is to make 1k and get a basket full of PlusPoints, this discovery was a game changer.  Ideally we always want to have our upgrades confirmed at booking time. Given work schedules and holidays we sometimes have book a flight without confirmable upgrade space and hope for the best when flight day comes. Tim and I have both had instances where, despite being 1k and using PlusPoints, we didn't get an upgrade because all the seats were sold or they were given to people with higher status. The big downer of my new strategy is that in these instances, we'll be even further down United's elaborate upgrade pecking order (i.e., a 1k requesting a MUA will lose the upgrad...

This one definitely falls under the category of "if I don't make a note to myself right now, I'm going to immediately forget how to do this next time." It's a super-specific problem:  I have a flight leg with a confirmed 40 PlusPoint upgrade into Polaris.  I need to change this leg to a different day/time.  I know that my new flight has PlusPoints ✅ instant-upgrade seats available. (I used Seats.aero and then manually verified the availability on United.com) I'm using United.com to change my flight and the search results only show me one option: a deeply-discounted fare + 80 PlusPoints to upgrade I would prefer an option with a less-discounted fare that only requires 40 PlusPoints I would prefer not to call United to have them sort this out. (In my case, the Australian United phone center is only open normal business hours, not 24/7) The solution: Change the flight on United.com (from a desktop browser) and manually set the 'Search by Fare class' fiel...

As previously discussed , we're doing 3-player mode for 2024 (one of us United 1k, one is Plat, one Gold), but as I'm currently booking travel for July, I'm already thinking about status for 2025.  Status match to Qantas? Tim's work visa for the US is delayed ( sigh ), so he likely won't be moving to New York until mid-2025 at the absolute earliest, so there's still going to be lots of trans-Pacific flying happening. Qantas is supposed to launch their new nonstop New York – Sydney service in 2025 , but that will likely be on an unpredictable time schedule much like Tim's work visa. I mention this because I thought that route might make it worth it for him to do the "secret" status match to Qantas (Oneworld) from United 1k.  But even if all of the economics of that worked out, will that flight even be pleasant? With our current situation, I really don't mind the 14 hours between Sydney and the US West Coast, but having to then immediately get o...

Update 27 Sept '23 (six weeks after initial post): my favorite email just arrived! The PlusPoints upgrade we requested for my early November flight from SFO to Sydney cleared! The current price difference between Polaris Business and what I paid for Premium Plus is $4470. So we have an upcoming heap of travel for my friends' wedding in Palm Springs, including legs to and from Australia (where the three of us will spend the end-of-year holidays again). I'm looking at our 2024 travel plans, our elite status, and the results of what that elite status got us in 2021-2023. Long story short, I think we're going to voluntarily pay $13,000 for a round-trip Business Class flight to Sydney to get one of us over the finish line for United 1k status .  It's hard for me to even type that . Yes, one of us has had 1k status since the pandemic, but spending $10k to get through Australia's harsh Covid restrictions was our only option back then. Now that it's voluntary, I wan...

Well, last summer we had an amazing moment of the marketing matching reality when United held Tim's SFO-SYD flight so people on his belated Newark-SFO flight could make their connection. Fast forward a year and the very same thing happened but with an odd twist... Tim's flight into LAX from Newark is an hour late. We then (happily) get an alert that the Sydney flight is also going to depart late. Upon landing at LAX they ask all Sydney passengers to raise their hands and tell them they have to make a run for it and everyone else on board should stay seated while they disembark.  They rush to the gate, and... the door is shut, jetway pulled back, and the plane is leaving without them. They head over to customer service to see about rebooking and Tim's handed a new boarding pass for the Melbourne flight that's about to leave and lo and behold his Plus Points upgrade to Polaris (from Premium Plus) survived the rebooking and he ended up in row 12 behind Tyra Banks.  Not su...

We're still waiting on Tim's green card (fingers crossed for sometime in Autumn of this year...), but until that happens there's still a lot of back-and-forth happening. Prices to Australia are still sky-high (north of $10,000 for Business) and award seats are still incredibly scarce. I usually search on United.com using Tim's account because he has 1k status, and I noticed this: A bunch of very-discounted fares from SFO and LAX to Sydney and Auckland. Given that the Saver level for Polaris is now 200,000 points each way, this was a steal . I had a few Chase points to transfer in, but I needed to buy points to top off my account.  So, for $2031 and 168,000 miles, I'm going round trip to Sydney in Polaris and spending the depths of winter enjoying Sydney's Vivid festival and Hobart's Dark Mofo . While making notes to myself for this post, I saw that this deal is no longer exclusive to 1k members , so if you're looking to get out of American summer and hi...

The beauty of transferrable points (like Chase Ultimate Rewards and Amex Membership Rewards) is that you can shop around a variety of airlines for an award seat and then instantly transfer your points to the airline where you've found a good itinerary. Given how competitive the battle for award seats is (especially this year!), a delay of even an hour can mean your seats are long gone by the time your points show up.  Chase Marketing (and the travel bloggers who make a large share of their revenue from credit card affiliate links) like to sell you on the idea that these transfers are instant. But if you search through the FlyerTalk forums , it's clear that they're only instant some of the time. In my case, I needed to transfer some points to United for a Business Class flight from New York to Seoul, so I transferred the points, logged out of United.com and logged back in (the usual procedure to make the miles show up), and... nothing. So I waited, and waited... made dinner...

I've seen a bunch of marketing hype from United about how they'll intentionally delay a departure so connecting customers on delayed flights won't miss their plane. I figured it was mostly just hot air and didn't give it much thought. Until Sunday.  Rain delayed the Newark-SFO leg of Tim's trip back to Sydney. His connection was tight to begin with, and once the delay hit 45 minutes, he was certain he'd misconnect. He asks a United agent in the lounge if he could just switch to the next day but she said "we're expecting storms tomorrow too, so that likely won't fix anything."  He decides to just wait it out, and they end up taking off at 8:12 instead of 6:30. He's 99% certain he's going to miss his connection to Sydney, but then he checks his United app as they're about to land in SFO and it has a banner at the top saying "We're about to save the day for a few customers with a tight connection. Thanks for standing by while...

A morning-to-morning flight in a comfortable lie-flat seat with reasonable food and 3 good lounge options in Sydney.  Pros Comfortable lie-flat seat Proper bedding and pajamas Cabin wasn't too hot Decent food 3 lounges to choose from This SFO flight has a lot more Business Class seats than the LAX flight, so your chance of scoring an upgrade is higher Cons Expensive - the round trip version of this is going for US$10,000 right now It's United, so there's no partner airlines if you're starting elsewhere in Australia and connecting. Someday that will change via their upcoming Virgin Australia partnership Connecting onward to NYC via SFO means there's a near-zero chance your upgrade will clear on that leg (there were 17 people with 1k AND Million Miler status on my flight!) Also, many of the planes on that route don't have a separate Premium Economy cabin, so I was in the waaay back of the plane for that leg. How I did it Paid $2310 for Premium Economy and used 30 ...

United's latest entry into the "if the airline is encouraging you to do it, it's probably a bad deal for you" contest. Even with the special transfer discount, it's $456.00 to transfer 38,000 miles – 1.2¢ per point for points that are very rarely worth more than 2¢ each.  If you know the person well enough to give them points, why not just save the money and buy the ticket for them with your miles? Like aside from the ill-informed, who uses this? Maybe like someone dies with a million miles in their account and their heirs all want to split up the miles? No idea  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  See also: United selling you points during a flight purchase checkout for an inflated price (see the last section of this story for details)  

I saw over on The Points Guy today that United's 747's will no longer fly to Japan . I love the 747 even though it's smaller than the A380 and it uses too much gas. The upstairs Business Class has all the comfort of a small private plane with all of the advantages of a jumbo jet. Sigh... I wish they'd have build this model with the sleeping attic! (click to enlarge) United is putting their new 777-300ER planes with the Polaris seats onto this route to replace the 747. While those seats will be nice in "Polaris" Class, keep in mind that in Economy, United shoved an extra seat into each row so it's now 10-abreast. Feeling a little nostalgic for this beautiful plane slowly going away, I dug out a video from our very first trip to Tokyo on United... 30 pounds and about 5,000 grey hairs ago (i.e., 2005). Bonus: at the end Dr. K actually caught me seeing my first-ever Japanese train in real life!