It’s finally here: the beginning of the end for the fees airlines charge to use your hard-earned miles.

Let me explain.  In the beginning you could accumulate enough miles for a trip, call the day before you wanted to leave, find a flight with a mileage seat and be on your way the next evening.  This flexibility was very valuable, because airfares generally rise to rip-off levels in the days leading up to a flight.  If you just had to be somewhere last minute, using 25,000 miles was a far better option than paying $1,500 to fly from LA to Chicago.

Eventually airlines realized this was costing them money so they started charging a fee for expedited service.  This was back in the days of paper tickets, roughly around the same time as the Commodore 64 and Super Nintendo.  And at the time, airlines were right to charge a fee: someone had to print out the tickets and FedEx them to you.  So an airline charging a $50 last minute fee was merely recouping its costs.  Fair enough.

But then came the era of the e-ticket (and the Game Cube).  And the costs incurred from issuing last minute tickets vanished: no more paper = no more FedEx.  And when travelers booked mileage awards online no airline staff had to get involved in the process.  Airlines were saving tremendous amounts of money.

So what did the airlines do?  Eliminate the fee in a gesture of goodwill to customers?  No, by this time fee revenue had become their crack cocaine and airlines were full-on junkies.  Fees went up, not away; they become staggered: no charge for booking more than 21 days out, up to $100 for booking with less than three weeks notice.

It took a recession and precipitous drop in demand to get here, but I’m happy to report that members of United’s Mileage Plus program can now live fee-free for last minute travel.  United has eliminated this bullshit fee so we can now use our miles at any time without having to pay for our “free” ticket.

This is great news for consumers and a step in the right direction for United.  However let’s not forget that United’s mileage program has a dark side more sinister than Lord Voldemort: they routinely block you from using your miles to book seats on their Star Alliance partners.

So while this fee elimination is a step in the right direction, United has some way to go before they’ll get my business again.