Here's what happened when we used my 5-year-old’s award miles to book travel

24.05.2024 - 13:31 / thepointsguy.com

My husband and I have always been passionate travelers. We've shared our love for exploring the world with our son, who, at just 5 years old, has already traveled to five continents. With his impressive collection of passport stamps has also come a significant number of frequent-flyer points and miles from the various airlines we've flown.

When we planned our latest family adventure to Scotland last month, it made sense to book his ticket using his own United MileagePlus miles rather than our own, based on our specific travel plans.

We booked our tickets in February. However, in March, United announced it was starting a family pooling program where groups of up to five members can link their United MileagePlus accounts to share and redeem miles. That's all to say, we would have avoided the issues detailed below if we had booked a few weeks later.

Before family pooling became available through United MileagePlus, we thought securing his seat alongside ours would be a breeze. As we soon found out, booking his ticket with his own points ended up causing more complications than we anticipated. This is something families should be aware of when choosing an airline.

Despite informing the airline via its online customer service chat feature that we were traveling as a family, when we tried to book separate tickets for each of us, it resulted in my son's being flagged as an unaccompanied minor.

The airline's system categorized him this way simply because his ticket was booked individually with his own miles. This created a string of inconveniences for us that took many hours and some extra spending to sort out.

Instead of grouping us as a family traveling together, the airline's reservation system considered each of us individual passengers with separate reservations. This made it difficult to secure seats together, so we had to pay extra (about $50 each way) to ensure we'd be seated as a family. This was an unexpected expense.

Since our son was flagged as an unaccompanied minor, we couldn't check him in online as we usually do to avoid long waits at the airport. Instead, we had to allocate extra time to check him in at the ticket counter; we had to explain to an agent that he wasn't traveling alone so the usual extra services (which can come at a cost) were not necessary.

Although we resolved the issue relatively smoothly at both Edinburgh Airport (EDI) and Newark Liberty International (EWR) airports due to shorter lines, it was still an inconvenience. During a busy travel season, these extra steps could easily add more stress to an already hectic travel day.

In the future, taking advantage of United's family pooling program should alleviate many of these problems.

For example, pooling our JetBlue TrueBlue