United We Sell !!

United just posted a new Miles Plus promotion:

Offer: Pay $20 and receive 1,000 bonus miles on your next qualifying United, United Express or Ted roundtrip.

Now, FMV is all for elite status on airlines - so we can see this "bonus" working out if it can help you reach or maintain elite tier status. Sign us up! But wait, there's more. United inserts this kicker of a clause:

"Bonus miles do not count toward elite qualification"

Excuse me? No thanks. Granted, this promotion does accelerate your earnings toward a reward. As a Premier Executive it might take only eight ORD-EWR trips instead of 11 to accrue a 35,000 mile reward. Yet that acceleration costs you $160! We GUESS this is a deal relative to the normal offer to "Buy Miles". United generously offers to sell miles every day, at an even suckier rate than this promotion: 1,000 miles for $64.57, and 5,000 miles for $182.82.

Yet the ONLY instance where we can see this promotion making sense is the case where you know your travel plans for the next several months and you know when you're done you'll be a few thousand miles short of the award ticket you want.

Otherwise, this is a blatant whoring of miles and lends more ammunition to the argument that the most profitable part of United is the Mileage Plus Program. There has even been talk that analysts believe United is preparing to divest the program - much like Aeroplan and Air Canada. If Mileage Plus were sold or taken public, it could be worth about $7.5 billion, compared to the airline itself with a total market value of around $5.5 billion.

Maybe this promotion helps UA demonstrate the consumer market price for miles? It certainly helps demonstrate that "there's one born every minute".