United Mileage Plus has added a new option for using your miles.  Now you can redeem your Mileage Plus miles for hotel stays and rental cars.  Get more details at united.com/hotelandcarawards.

A very precursory review of some sample bookings of hotel rooms appeared to offer several options all the way up to 5-star properties, but they weren’t cheap.  One high-end L.A. hotel priced out at just over 45,000 miles, but another large chain hotel near LAX was pricing at approximately 16,000 miles.  A one-day car rental for pickup at LAX was 10,000 miles.  I’ll let you be the judge of whether or not those represent the best uses of your miles.

In any event, if you have more miles than you can spend, you now have a new option to use them.  And I’ll never complain about that.