Donating Free Upgrades for Military Members on United

This is becoming an annual tradition at The Military Frequent Flyer. I have been contacted by a generous donor who cannot use his United upgrades before they expire at the end of Jan. If you are in the military (including family members) and are looking for a domestic or international upgrade, please send me a comment or email (see About Me).

Upgrades work differently (better) with United’s new Plus Points system they just started. Up to now, elites would receive a combination of Regional Upgrades and Global Upgrades and we here at TMFF would need to match the donated upgrades to the flights that military members had booked. That is all gone now. Elites receives a certain number of Plus Points and they can be used for either domestic or international flights – the international ones would simply cost more. Also gone is the annoying requirement that GPUs needed a W fare or higher. This requirement is what killed me from using my upgrades I used to receive as a 1K. Now it just costs more if you have a cheaper fare. Here is the schedule of point costs:

In past years, I have had some people ask for upgrades on a speculative basis and they then never got a flight and let the upgrades expire. That’s not fair to other SMs. If you want the upgrades, you need to have a flight. I’ll give you three days to get something otherwise, we’ll go on to the next request. Once I contact you to inform you that you have an upgrade, I will need you to email me the Record Locator and your last name for the donor to go into their account and apply the upgrade.

We currently have one donor, but if there are others of you out there that would like to give a nice boost to a Service Member, please send me an email. We can also take other airlines upgrades too. Thanks to everyone for their generosity!