Frequent Miler on the Air - United Polaris awards wide-open to cardholders & elites | Coffee Break Ep120 | 8-26-26

Episode Date: August 26, 2026

Get 15% of on Saily E-SimsThis podcast episode is sponsored by Saily. Saily is an ESIM service app created by the security experts behind NordVPN. Instead of paying absurd daily rates to your home carrier or swapping SIM cards on arrival, Saily gives you flexible prepaid data plans in over 200 destinations worldwide. Download Saily from your app store and use our code FREQUENTMILER at checkout to get 15% off your first purchase. https://saily.com/frequentmilerJust by having the right United credit card or elite status, you'll have wide-open United Polaris award availability!Read about United's amazing cardholder award availability here(01:20) - Polaris(02:00) - Define Saver(02:38) - Better Saver Polaris availability for both cardholders & elites, and additional award discounts require card(03:31) - Example North America to Europe(05:38) - Research and findings(15:12) - The April cliff...what is it and why is April significant?(17:07) - Nick & Greg's thoughts/analysis: Is this a one-time thing to get people to sign up for United cards?(22:02) - Is Nick going to jump on the United cardholder bandwagon?Learn more about the Best United Cards here: https://frequentmiler.com/best-united-card/Subscribe and FollowVisit https://frequentmiler.com/subscribe/ to get updated on in-depth points and miles content like this, and don’t forget to like and follow us on social media.Music Credit – “Ocean Deep” by Annie YoderCheck out all of our other travel podcasts from around the worldThis podcast is part of the Voyascape Network, a collection of some of the world’s best travel podcasts. Explore more at Voyascape.com. For advertising or sponsorship opportunities on this show and across the network, email [e-mail] or you can find more information at Voyascape.com/advertsing.

This is a Voyescape podcast. You can find all of our travel podcasts from around the world at voyescape.com. 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 coffee break is limited to 20 minutes or less or 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 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 and 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 in my caffeine list, but I'm also United Cardless. Yes.

And with Nick, just off of vacation, you can give them a break for not maybe being 100% up to speed on this topic as well. the the um let me back up a little bit and and say in the title of the show i said um polaris awards wide open what is polaris uh nick i think you could you could explain that one right that one i can explain properly so polaris is what united calls their business class similar to delta calls there's delta one or american calls there's flagship business so polaris is just their word for business class when 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. Yeah. Okay. And then the other thing is saver awards. What is a saver award? Those are 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. 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 saver 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 me 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 could see right there, the advantage of being able to get access to these save rewards is absolutely huge from 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 Savor Awards. Wow. I mean, either of those is a huge, any of the number. the those options is a huge difference over what people would look at ordinarily. 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, right? I see that all the time when I search on United.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 a one-off here and there, flights that nobody wants anyway? Right, right. And the other thing was like, are they just going to get rid of non-cardholder awards

but keep the same number of awards that they had before, but only for cardholders? So I did some research, and I used Seatsteadero, 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 SeatSotero 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 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 away that Polaris Saver Awards, there's incredible award availability if you have the credit card or elite status. Without a card or elite status, saver awards are virtually non-existent. Now, again, this is for Business Class International Awards and nonstop.

And also specifically flying United is what I'm talking about. So, okay. So where we really found most of the space was flying between North American Europe. You know, that's incredibly popular. Everybody's, you know, looking for those awards and United's Gotham and Spades. I found flights to Europe, if you're a card holder, I found 783 of them. them available, which is a lot, right? For non-card holders, though, or non-elites, five. Ouch! Ouch! Oh, my goodness. So nearly impossible if you don't have a card to find the

business class award at the saver level on United to Europe. Right, right. So, you know, we don't have a way to prove that the 783 number is way higher than it was before, but, but it feels way higher to me. Like, right? Like, it didn't feel like there was that much United Awards space available before. And now, as a cardholder, it feels like there's a lot. Things get even better for return flights. So if you're flying from Europe to the states or to Canada, cardholders, there were 2,324 flights available.

This is on the morning we're recording this. And also, I should say. say this is using Seatsutero, which pre-cashes results. So it doesn't literally mean there's that many right at this moment in time. It means that when Seatside Arrow last looked at each of the routes in these thousands available, it found that many at the time it looked at them. And, you know, next time it looks, it'll refresh those numbers. But since this is the same pattern as I saw a week ago, I think it's a pretty stable pattern. Okay, so again, that was over 2,300 available, and to non-card holders, 50.

Well, so there's a little bit of hope for finding something, but not very much. Wow, what a huge difference that is, 50 to 2,324. Wow, that's a big difference. So, okay, a lot of words based to Europe, and that's nice, but United has a lot of partners that fly to Europe. Lufthansa releases a decent amount of availability. I mean, I'm usually able to find Star Alliance awards on partners to Europe. Asia's impossible, though. So tell me some good news.

Yeah. So the Asia numbers don't look as great as the Europe numbers. But if you consider the fact that finding business class award space at saver levels to Asia in general is really, really tough. from that light, these numbers look good. So flying from North America to Asia on United, 332 available, return flight, 483. Yeah, that's excellent. That's much better than it would have expected.

Obviously, it's no 2,324, but there also aren't nearly as many routes that United operates, I don't think, anyway, to and from Asia. So, you know, from that standpoint, that's pretty good. I mean, when you consider how difficult, like you said, Greg, I mean, it's been almost impossible.

I say almost, maybe not almost. Maybe that's a bit of hyperbole really hard, like you said, to find good award availability to and from Asia and anybody these days. So the fact that a card makes that much more space available is that's notable. Yeah. And I'll also mention you don't have to, the card holder doesn't have to be flying. So like, you know, if I want to book an award for my. son to fly to Asia, I can do that using this award space that opens up. Well, I'm glad you mentioned,

I'm glad you mentioned booking for your son because my next question was, is this all award space for one person? You know, like that, because that's not useful to me. I've got a family. I've got to fly. So if I'm looking to fly with multiple passengers, is, is any of this award space going to do me any good? Because 2,324 flights, if they've got one seat, don't matter much to me. Right, right. And that's where things get bonkers. So I thought the same thing. When I started seeing these huge numbers of flights available, I thought, all right, these have got to be for just one person. And, you know, and that's why there's so many available because very few people fly is just one person. And so it would make sense. But a bizarre thing happened. So Seatsider will let you, you know, put,

what are the minimum number of seats you're looking for in their Explorer feature? And So I bumped it all the way up to nine, which is the highest you can go. That's the highest that the airlines will show how many seats are available. So nine really means there's nine or more available. And I want to see what would that do? I thought there would be like none available once they bumped it up to nine, right? So let's look at what happened. So flights to Europe, when I did this, there were 783 available for one or more.

and when I bumped it up to nine seats, it dropped to 778. So five, five fewer. So almost all of those flights, I had nine seats or more? At least at some point in time. Wow. So when I first saw this pattern, I started digging in, like, actually doing the search on United's website itself. And often I'd find. Yes, there really are nine seats.

You know, that I, because my first reaction was like, okay, seats that arrow just has a bug here. There's no way. So, but my first few, yeah, I found nine. A lot of times I would find like five or seven seats available because presumably between the time seats atero cached it and the time I was looking at, it changed. Interestingly, United's award calendar does the same caching thing or there's some, There's a similar problem there. So I took one route. Another way I sort of investigated this to see is this real.

Took one route and used United's advanced search to say, I want nonstop flights, United only, business class only, nine people. Show me the award calendar, basically. And it would show me the month my month award calendar. And there was tons of dates with these nine person awards available. But just like seats at arrow, sometimes when I click through, there weren't nine available. Then I had to, I would see like a 200,000 point, you know, result. And then I have to reduce the number of travelers to get down to that saver award again. So that's a mystery to me, what exactly is going on.

So I can't promise that the numbers are really as high as I'm describing here. But I can say they're astronomically higher than I would have ever guessed or even believed to someone said this to me without data to back it up, right? Yeah, yeah. Well, when you first started talking about this, I was, I was skeptical. Even, like, you seemed excited about how much award availability there was. And I was, I was thinking, maybe you just haven't been looking at award space much, you know, and you got excited about a couple of dates.

But this is, I mean, this looks real. This looks like a real thing. Yeah. I don't know why I doubted you. Let me be clear. I don't know why I doubt it, correct. But for a minute, I was like, That can't be, right?

It just can't be, right? Yeah, no, it's totally preposterous. We don't see this kind of thing in the real world, but we're seeing it. Yeah. There's a possible negative thing, though. Let's talk about the April cliff. The April cliff. So I started looking at award availability month to month instead of for the whole year.

And what I found was like while March of 2027 would have the usual big number of awards available, suddenly it would drop precipitously in April of 27. So for example, North America to Europe, in March you have 111 available. In April, you have seven. In May and June, you have zero. It pops up a little bit more in July. You've got 34 in July.

But basically what we're seeing is the kind of numbers I would have originally kind of expected, maybe before all this happened, starting in April. And a similar thing, not as drastic in the other direction, going Europe to North America. The April cliff isn't as steep as the other direction, but there's definitely a trailing off April, May, June, and July keeps getting lower and lower and lower. So something is happening there, and it makes me nervous because April 2nd of 2026

is when United launched this feature. Well, that's interesting. Yeah. So is there something about April going on? Hmm. Beware of the aides of April or something like that.

All right. Well, we'll be right back after this with our thoughts and analysis about what that means and whether or not this is an invitation or I guess really more so, whether or not you need to get a united credit card because of this.

And we're back. All right. So we left off talking about this April Cliff and what that means. And I'm really kind of curious because I look at this and say on the one hand, with all of that availability, it really feels like it'd be a good idea to get a united credit card if you want access to that space. But the other part of being wonders, is this just a carrot they're dangling to get people to sign up for United credit cards?

Is this going to hang around? So what do you think? Is this a one-time thing just to kind of pump it up and get everybody excited about United Cards? And then after April, we just aren't going to see this anymore. Or they just haven't released stuff for next summer. What's going on? What do you think? Yeah.

You know, we don't know the answer to that. It's certainly possible, right? Like, it's suspicious that April is the cliff when they introduced the thing in April. So maybe they just overwhelmed the system with lots of awards so that everyone, one would run out and get a credit card and then they'd be, they'd be, you know, sad next year. But I think it's, I think there's a number of other explanations that are equally likely. One is that just, you know, maybe United doesn't tend to release that much award space more than seven months or so into the future, right?

And that wouldn't be surprising to me. I've seen that pattern with other airlines where it's not until you get within maybe five months where suddenly you see a word space. And so if United has something like that going on, that would make sense. The other thing that I think makes a lot of sense to me, although it doesn't really explain how there's a cliff, but how there's a drop off is that if they're using projections to say, how likely are these seats to be. bought before flying, the ability to project more than several months in the future is going to be tough, right? And so they might be just like, well, we don't have any confidence on most of these flights that there's going to be seats available that haven't been sold, you know, if we don't release these seats. And so they might be just sort of holding back until the confidence level gets better so that they can know it's pretty unlikely. We're going to sell these at full price, so we might as well release the award space.

You know, I think we can make up all kinds of ideas like that about why it might be happening. I think it's my bet is that it's one of those things where United just has, is delayed in releasing Wardspace in the future and that's coincidence about the April thing. That's my bet, but I obviously can't promise it. Yeah, you know, I think it's interesting. I mean, Europe is obviously very popular in spring and summer. So it also just might be that they don't intend to release that much space far in advance. I mean, like you said, they may not be confident that there's going to be a lot of empty seats.

And that would be fair because that is a time when a lot of people are going. So it wouldn't be wildly surprising to see them hold off on releasing that until closer to departure. Like you said, lots of other airlines are kind of similar. The summertime from the U.S. to Europe is notoriously challenging. And I don't actually find it that challenging from the Northeast, but it ebbs and flows. So if I looked at it on any one specific day, maybe it would look like nothing is available. But then, you know, another day it might look like the world is available to Europe. So that to me is, you know, not shocking or surprising.

thing. You know, like you said, we can't really predict. I have to imagine it would be kind of short-sighted of them to release a whole bunch of award space just for one year to get some new card holders and then not do anything to keep those card holders. So I would think that it's more likely that we'll see an increase in availability over time that we'll kind of see something because it seems like they have a desire to really make this a thing to, you know, to, you know, to make this a big incentive to get the card. I think we'll have a decent idea next month because I expect that next month

we'll see more awards available in April and the drop-off will move more to May. If I'm right about that, we'll know that pretty soon. Of course, even if that doesn't happen, it doesn't prove anything because it could be that they update their award availability every three months or something. You know, we don't know.

We don't know. Right. But we're going to start watching, and hopefully we'll find out what the pattern is if there is one. All right, with all of that, Nick, you haven't, you don't have a United Credit Card. Is that right? That's correct. Is this going to change anything? Are you going to run out and get one?

No, I'm probably not going to run out and get one. I can understand why a lot of people might be interested in this. It's not as compelling for me because, we tend to more often travel to Europe. And like I said, I usually don't have a lot of trouble finding availability on other Star Alliance airlines. And so I'm not often like seeking that United Space. Now, if that other award space were to dry up and I wasn't able to get it, then I might feel more compelled to go get a United card. But I'm not necessarily compelled to get a card for availability on one single airline when there are so many other airlines out there operating between the U.S.

and Europe. Now, Asia on the flip side, that's a use case where I kind of wish that I could get a United Card for that, because we would like to plan another trip to Asia. And I've been looking some, and it is really tough to find good award space to Asia. However, I'm over 524, so I'm probably not going to qualify for a United Card anytime soon. So it's unlikely that I'll get it. Maybe my lack of desire is partly influenced by the fact that it's not easily accessible

to me anyway. But I'm not as excited as some will be over the ability to book business class for 68 or 72,000 miles or whatever because I very frequently book business class on other Star Alliance Airlines via Air Canada Aeroplane

from the northeast of the United States for 60 or 75,000 miles per passenger. Air France, KLM Flank Blue, very often has availability like that. I've got a lot of SAS Miles and SAS has had decent availability a couple of months in advance for folks looking at a book with Miles. So I don't feel desperate to get a United Card for that availability specifically. However, if I had a lot of United Miles or if I had a lot of Chase Ultimate Rewards points that I didn't have other plans for,

then I think I'd feel more compelled to get a united card. But as it stands, not really for me, but what about you? If you didn't have a united card, because I know you do, that's how you've found a lot of this stuff, right? If now, knowing what you know now, if you didn't have a united card,

I'm curious about you because you're not in the Northeast, so your options to get to Europe are much more limited. What would you do? Would you get a united? No, I mean, there's no question I would. You know, the United Cards, especially United Business Card, practically pays for itself and gives you this better space, reduced cost pricing. And I like United's product. I like their business class experience.

They have great tech. Overall, yeah, I don't think I would hesitate. Now, let me mention quickly, those who might not think they could get approved for a United Credit Card can also optionally get the United Debit Card, which is not through Chase or anything. And you do need to, on that one or the United Credit Card that is a no annual fee, you do have to spend $10,000 a year in order to keep getting that better award availability and saver availability. but that could certainly be a really good option for a lot of people. I'm going to end my thoughts with the fact that Nick says he's not going to do this means it's good news for the rest of us. So Nick's, Nick and his family aren't going to be taking up our room space.

That's right. That's right. But I do want to echo one thing that Greg said, and that is that I do like United's Polaris product. And I think particularly as a family traveler, so you are lucky, Greg, because particularly as a family traveler, the player of seats are actually perfect if you're flying with a kid because you get two of those middle seats and you're right next to each other. And it's super convenient. Great way to fly to Europe if you do fly with kids. So I will say that that part of it is somewhat compelling. It is a better product, in my opinion, than many of the others that you could choose going to Europe. So I could certainly see why you're excited about it. This episode was produced and edited by Carrie Yoder, music by Anne. any odor. If you've enjoyed what you've heard today and you'd like to get more of this in your email inbox each day or each week, go to Frequentmyler.com slash subscribe to join our email list.

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