Back in November 2021 United introduced a Money + Miles option. Similar to hotel Points + Cash booking options, Money + Miles gave you the ability to book a flight with – you guessed it – money and miles.
This feature flew under the radar for the most part as the redemption value was poor, averaging ~0.75cpp (cents per point). At some point since then – or perhaps ever since this redemption option was introduced – United allows you to get 1cpp of value when making a Money + Miles booking but only if you’re a cardholder or have Premier status.
Now, I can’t guarantee that every Money + Miles fare generates a 1cpp value, but all the searches I’ve done recently have ended up with that pricing.
For example, let’s look at a one-way flight from EWR-MCO on February 23. Here are two nonstop options that day when it comes to a regular award booking for someone who doesn’t have status or a United credit card…
…and here’s the cash pricing.
When starting on United’s homepage, you only get the choice of paid and award flights. You have to run one of those searches first, then the search bar at the top of the page will let you change that to Money + Miles.
Here’s how the Money + Miles fares show up for me below. As you can see, when booking a regular award flight on this route you get the choice between economy or first. With cash rates and Money + Miles though, you can also choose basic economy and economy plus (economy refundable is an option for cash bookings, but not Money + Miles).
Let’s look first at the economy options. You can pay $118 cash for those options or redeem 5,500 MileagePlus miles with a $63 cash co-pay. That means you’re saving $55 by redeeming 5,500 miles – a 1cpp value.
It’s a similar calculation for first class too. For example, the cash price on the 6:15am flight is $479, with the Money + Miles option being 24,000 miles with a $239 cash co-pay. You’d be redeeming 24,000 miles to save $240 cash which again is 1cpp.
A Couple Of Caveats
There are a couple of caveats to this finding though. The first is that if you’re a United cardholder or have some level of Premier status, you can get preferential award pricing on Saver flights. For example, rather than redeeming 15,000 miles for these flights, I could book them for only 9,600 miles + $5.60 in taxes.
With the Money + Miles options, I could redeem 5,500 miles + $63. With the Saver award, I could redeem an additional 4,100 miles to save $57.40. That latter redemption would get 1.4cpp of value from the additional 4,100 miles which seems worthwhile if you’d already be content with a 1cpp redemption value from Money + Miles, although it works out to be a 1.17cpp redemption overall.
The other caveat is that this 1cpp value only seems to be available for cardholders and/or those with status. I have a United Gateway card which was converted from an Explorer card, plus I have United Premier Silver status thanks to United’s partnership with Marriott with whom I have Titanium status. My wife doesn’t have either and this is the pricing she sees on her account for a Money + Miles booking on this same route and dates:
As you can see, the pricing for her is different. Rather than being $63 + 5.5k miles for economy, it’s $83 + 5k. When compared to the $118 cash pricing, she’d be redeeming 5k miles to save $35. That’s a 0.7cpp redemption value which is in keeping with what we saw when this feature was first launched. The first class options are a similar redemption value too.
Final Thoughts
A 1cpp redemption value isn’t great compared to the value that you can get when redeeming United MileagePlus miles. However, it is nice to have this floor value for their miles if you have one of their credit cards or status with United.
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This is very helpful info, and I’d like to share a caveat that I found while looking into it.
I tried booking SFO-EWR R/T 4/3-10. The best First Class fare I could find with Money & Miles was $942 + 96K. However, with Premier status and/or a United card, one often gets discounted rates on miles-only tickets, and the best F/C fare using just miles on those same days is $60K + $11.
So, at least in this case, having Premier status or a United card gives you a MUCH better miles-only fare than miles&money. The obvious moral is that you need to check all options.
Does this work if you have SILVER status?
Yes
It’s interesting, because you also get 1 cent per point PQP for mileage redemptions.
I love using the UA award search site however it’s # of Stop filter option is very user unfriendly since it only allows 2+ stops. There a big difference between 2 & 3+ stops. Is there any way to get around this?
[…] Delta Airlines or United Airlines will introduce a “Miles and Cash” payment option for award tickets (pay 10,000 miles or pay 8,000 miles + $40). – Yes, UA does have a “Miles & Money” payment method that offers between 0.75 CPP – 1.0 CPP (Frequent Miler article). […]
I have seen this for at least two years. So much so, that I assumed that it was 1 cpp officially for everyone
Just to check, do you have status or a United credit card? I’d ignored it when it launched as I’d read it only gave something like 0.6-0.8cpp value; it was only in recent days where I started doing some searches for this payment method and noticed it was 1cpp for me and 0.7 for my wife.
I have a United credit card. Never checked before I had the card.
Any idea if the cash portion of these gets reimbursed by the Amex airline incidental credit?
I don’t think we’ve had any data points on our airline fee reimbursements resource for this specific thing, so I’m not sure I’m afraid.
Any idea if these miles and money tickets are like cash tickets (earn miles) or award tickets (don’t earn miles)?
Unless things have changed since they launched it a couple of years ago, you do earn miles on the cash portion you pay.
The other question is if you get lifetime miles for miles and money, as you don’t on award tickets.
I just did this recently for a status run to get my Premier 1K as I was two PQFs short. I got miles and PQPs but no lifetime flight miles for the trip. This is consistent with United’s T&C.
Any word on cancellations of tix purchased this way? It’d be great if they could be cancelled penalty-free like award tix.
I haven’t had a chance to look into that yet.