Let me tell you a story about the United Excursionist Perk, the little-known award travel tip even points and miles pros forget about.
When I started planning a trip to New Zealand from Phoenix, Arizona, I knew I was looking at some long travel days. Ever the maximizer, I started wondering if I could also squeeze in a brief stop in Australia. If my husband and I were going to fly for 14 hours and spend hoarded airline miles from a dwindling stash, we might as well try to squeeze in as much as possible, right? And thanks to the United Excursionist Perk, we were able to.
In fact, the perk allowed us to book a stopover in Sydney for zero extra United miles, bringing the total for our entire itinerary in economy to 80,000 miles per person. That’s a far cry from the $7,208 per person the same route would have cost us at the time of booking. Here’s how you can use the United Excursionist Perk perk to your jet-setting advantage.
The United Excursionist Perk, as United officially phrases it, is “a free one-way award within select multi-city itineraries.” In regular traveler language: If you have an itinerary that has at least two flights—one to your desired destination or region, and another one to get back home—you can score a third one-way flight without using extra miles.
For example, say you live in New York and want to visit London for a week. A roundtrip economy ticket from the North America to Europe is just 60,000 United miles. Nice deal, right? Well, since you're already on that side of the Atlantic, what about a quick weekend in Paris? Good news: You can book your United award reservation as a multi-city itinerary—New York to London, London to Paris, and Paris to New York—and the cheapest segment (the London to Paris flight) will cost zero miles thanks to the Excursionist perk.
It’s simple enough, in theory. But the perk does have some rules that feel like the math word problems that made me sweat in middle school. The perk must be used within a single MileagePlus-defined region, e.g. “Mainland US, Alaska & Canada,” “Europe,” “Australia & New Zealand,” etc. Also, the perk cannot be used in the region where your travel originates, and the travel booking must end in the region of origin.
So in the above example, the London to Paris flight can trigger the Excursionist perk because both cities are in the Europe region. But since you can’t use the perk in the region of origin, you can't go from New York to Boston first (both in North America), then onward to London (Europe). That said, since the requirement says you just have to end the trip in the region of origin, you can technically go from New York to London to Paris to Boston (since New York and Boston are in the same region), while getting the
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