Hack Your United Airlines Miles

I wouldn’t call myself a full-blown credit card churner/hacker, I only have two credit cards, but I definitely do my research to reap the rewards.  A few years ago when I was researching what card I should get for myself, I landed on the Chase Sapphire Reserve card since I spend most of my money on travel and dining, and at the time, they were doing 100k reward point bonus when you sign up. There are entire websites dedicated to evaluating every credit card reward out there, so I won’t go into all the benefits the card has. What I do want to talk about is a hack that I stumbled upon a few years ago that I haven’t seen anybody talk about. I was about to get on a United Airlines flight so I opened up my app and saw they were advertising for the UnitedMileagePlusX app. I decided to download it to see what it was about. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t expecting very much. The app allows you to earn United award miles when you shop through their links or purchase eGift cards at stores like Uber, Starbucks, Wal-Mart etc. I decided to buy an Uber eGift card and load it on my app since I knew I would use it once I landed. Here is what I found: Now follow me on this:

I bought a $100 Uber gift card:

  • Points earned:
    • 100 United award miles
    • 300 Chase Rewards points (this counts for 3x points on travel category since I bought through United)

This is cool right?!?! Instead of earning the 3x points on the Uber I would’ve called anyway, I also got United miles! The fun doesn’t stop there. That transaction also equaled $4.50 towards travel and the award miles when I redeem my points for travel.

Definitely a very specific benefit, but if you have the Chase Sapphire Reserve card, need something from the list of stores they offer through the app, and use United Airlines enough, can you argue with free miles? Check it out and let me know what you think!