The concept of pooling frequent flyer miles began a few years ago. Depending on the program, you can combine your miles with those of family and/or friends into a joint account. This allows for a larger “pool” of miles from which the members of the group whose miles are in the account can use to purchase flights.
Upgraded Points appears to have the most up-to-date list of airlines (28 of them, according to their count) that allow people to pool miles. Of the 28 they mention, 23 of them are airlines from outside the U.S.
In March 2024, United Airlines’s MileagePlus program was the first airline loyalty program in the U.S. to allow up to five members to contribute and combine their miles into a joint account. Others followed suit, and there are currently 5 U.S. airlines that allow such pooling:
Each of the 5 pooling programs has its own rules, some of which may work totally well with your plans to use the pooled miles. But before you decide to pool your miles, make sure you read all the fine print, before you discover there are regulations that may stop you from using those miles as you intended.
These are some of the things to watch out for (and a couple of particularly good things to keep in mind, as well):
Frontier: Family Pooling
- Frontier’s Family Pool isn’t open to everyone. You have to either reach Elite Silver status with the airline or have a Frontier Airlines World Mastercard.
- Upon choosing to leave a Family Pool, your account will enter a 90 day “cooling off” period in which your account may not enter any previous pools or join or create additional pools.
- If at any time an individual contributor does not have accrual activity within the 12 Month expiration policy, that contributor’s Miles will expire and no longer be available for redemption by the pool or individually.
Hawaiian Airlines: Share Miles
- Hawaiian’s Share Miles program isn’t a joint account program in the true sense of the term “pooling.” However, they do allow you to share your HawaiianMiles with someone else’s HawaiianMiles account.
- If you have a Hawaiian Airlines® World Elite MasterCard®, Bankoh Hawaiian Airlines Visa® check card or Hawaiian Airlines Visa® credit card-Japan, you can share or receive miles for free.
- Cardholders are limited to 10 transactions per year.
- If you don’t have any of the above credit cards, you will have to pay a fee to give or receive Share Miles.
- A good thing: Since Hawaiian and Alaska are merging, you can transfer points between the two. This means Hawaiian miles could be shared, and then transfer them into your Alaska account.
jetBlue: Points Pooling
- Members are not permitted to join multiple Points Pooling accounts.
- If a member leaves a pool, their remaining points will be reinstated to their individual TrueBlue account. There is a minimum 6-month waiting period before replacing a Pool Member.
- A good thing: jetBlue allows you to use pooled miles for flights on their partners.
Spirit: Free Spirit Points Pooling
- Spirit points expire if your account has had no activity in 12 months (unless you have a Free Spirit Credit Card).
United: MileagePlus
- Pooling is only limited to 5 people.
- “You can’t take it with you.” Miles contributed by any member who leaves the pool will be forfeited by that member and will stay with the pool to be shared among remaining members.
- A new member may not join the pool for the next 90 days after a member has left, and members who leave cannot join another miles pool for the next 90 days.
- If a pool leader decides to leave a pool, the entire pool is dissolved and all of the remaining miles in the pool will be distributed equally amongst the remaining members (regardless of how many miles each person contributed to the pool in the first place).
- This is the worst part: Pooled miles can be used to book United or United Express award tickets only. So you can have miles up the yin-yang and if you want to fly on one of United’s partners in StarAlliance, it’s “too bad, so sad” – you can’t use pooled miles for those flights. ONLY United or United Express flights.
Of all five U.S.-based pooling options, United’s is by far the most restrictive. Heads up and plan accordingly.
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