United is once again offering a bonus when converting points from hotel programs. This latest edition of the offer is giving a 25% bonus when making a transfer by the end of June.
The Deal
- Get 25% bonus United miles when converting hotel points to your MileagePlus account.
- Direct link to registration.
Key Terms
- To qualify for this offer, members must register for the promotion between June 1, 2026 and 11:59pm EST on June 30, 2026.
- A member must earn award miles as a result of one or more points to miles conversion transactions from any combination of MileagePlus hotel partner programs that offer a points to miles transfer program that are conducted during the Promotional Period (“Qualifying Activity”) in order to qualify for MileagePlus Hotel Points-to-Miles bonus miles (“Bonus Miles”). Qualifying Activity must be completed by 11:59pm EST on June 30, 2026.
- At the conclusion of the promotion, all miles earned by each member from Qualifying Activity will be multiplied by 25% to determine the eligible bonus up to a maximum of 25,000 bonus miles. Bonus miles will be credited into the member’s account on or before January 31, 2027. The maximum bonus miles that can be earned by a member under this promotion is 25,000.
- For transfers of Marriott Bonvoy points into MileagePlus miles, the standard offer of a 10,000 miles bonus for every 60,000 Marriott Bonvoy points transferred shall be excluded when calculating the Bonus Miles for this offer.
Quick Thoughts
United runs a promotion like this every year, although the transfer bonus percentage differs from year to year. Last year it was 25%, but for several years before that it was 30%. Somewhat interestingly, United normally runs this kind of promotion in September or October, so this latest iteration has shown up a few months earlier than usual.
This promotion isn’t going to be worth it for transfers from the vast majority of hotel programs, although there are a couple of potential exceptions. One is if you have orphaned points in a hotel program where they’ll expire before you’re likely to redeem them and you don’t consider it worth ensuring there’s some kind of other activity on your account to keep those points alive.
The other exception is Marriott. Every three Marriott Bonvoy points you transfer convert to one airline mile in a wide variety of programs, one of which is United. For every 60,000 Marriott points you transfer to airlines, you get 5,000 bonus miles (i.e. 60,000 points becomes 25,000 miles). Marriott has a partnership with United that enhances that bonus to 10,000 miles, so every 60,000 Marriott Bonvoy points transferred becomes 30,000 MileagePlus miles.
This 25% bonus makes that transfer ratio even better, although it’s only calculated on the base transfer rather than the additional 10,000 bonus miles you get for every 60,000 points transferred. That means that with this latest promotion, transferring 60,000 Marriott points will get you 35,000 United MileagePlus miles. That’s certainly not a no-brainer transaction, but it might make sense if you have an abundance of Marriott points and have a high value United redemption in mind.
There’s another potential future scenario where this transfer bonus could be of interest and that’s when transferring Wyndham Rewards points. Last year, Wyndham ran a concurrent promotion with United’s 25% bonus that awarded a 100% bonus on transferred points. That gave an effective transfer ratio of two Wyndham points for every one United mile. There’s no such Wyndham 100% bonus right now, but perhaps we’ll see one before the month is up.
Before transferring any kind of hotel points though, be aware that you could be waiting for the bonus miles for a looooooooong time. The terms state that “Bonus miles will be credited into the member’s account on or before January 31, 2027.” That’ll be the 25% bonus miles, rather than the standard amount of miles you’ll initially get from the transfer. Still, that’s a ridiculously long delay if that’s how long it actually takes for the bonus miles to be awarded. I find it hard to believe that’ll be how long it takes, so hopefully the bonus miles show up sooner than that; please let us know in the comments if you take advantage of this transfer bonus and the bonus miles appear immediately.
For what it’s worth, when United ran this same promotion last year, the offer ran from October 1-31, 2025 and the terms stated that the bonus miles would be awarded by January 31, 2026. I suspect they simply updated the year in the terms from 2026 to 2027, without taking into account that the deal is running four months earlier than in 2025. If there was a similar delay to last year, that would mean the bonus miles would be credited by September 30, 2026—a similar three month wait after the offer ends. That’s pure speculation on my part though; perhaps United can only be bothered to reconcile bonuses from these transfers once per year and they’re fixated on a January 31 date.
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