Award Travel’s Best Kept Secret – United’s Excursionist Perk!

So, you’ve jumped into the miles game and are ready to book an award flight on United.  Before you book that ticket, are your origin airport and destination airport in different regions?  If so, you might be eligible for a free flight.   The United MileagePlus program separates the world into different regions to determine award prices.   Here is a link to United’s current regions:

As an example, Mainland USA, Alaska and Canada are all considered one region.  The islands of the Caribbean are in another.  Most of Europe is one region, while South America is split in half with Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, French Guyana, Peru, and Suriname in one region, and
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in another.  You get the idea …..

With the Excursionist Perk if you book a single itinerary with three or more one-way awards (flights) you will be eligible to receive one of those one-way awards for free, if it meets all of the following conditions:

• The Excursionist Perk cannot be in the MileagePlus defined region where your travel originates. (For example, if your journey begins in the United States you will only receive the Excursionist Perk if the Excursionist flight begins in a region outside of United States.)
• Travel must end in the same MileagePlus defined region where travel originates (if you’re coming from the United States your last flight on the reservation must return to the United States).
• The origin and destination of the Excursionist Perk flight is within a single MileagePlus defined region. (For example, if the Excursionist flight starts in the European region it must end in the European region)

Sounds confusing, but it’s actually not.  Here’s an example: Let’s say I live in West Palm Beach, Florida, and wanted to take a trip to London, England using miles.  The cheapest economy flights to Europe are generally around 60,000 miles (30,000 miles each way).  Because I am starting in one region and traveling to another, I have an opportunity to make use of the Excursionist Perk.  All of Europe is in one region, so you can basically choose any city in Europe to visit – for this example let’s use Paris, France. Instead of doing a round-trip award search from West Palm Beach to London, I would do a multi-city search for a flight from West Palm Beach to London, then a second flight from London to Paris, and a third flight from Paris to West Palm Beach.  The London to Paris flight qualifies as an Excursionist flight and will be free because:

1. The Excursionist Perk was not used in the region where my travel started (I used it in Europe and started in the United States)
2. My travel ends in the same region that it originated (I started my trip and ended it in the United States)
3. The origin and destination of my Excursionist flight started and ended in the same region. (London and Paris are both in Europe and thus the same region).

Europe is a great place to use the Excursionist Perk because there are so many beautiful countries to visit.  We took a trip to Italy on award points before I knew about the perk and now, I’m mad that I didn’t use it to just “pop in” to Iceland or Spain lol!

We took the kids to Hawaii this summer using award miles.  Hawaii is its own award region, so it is the only state you can go to from the US and still use the Excursionist Perk. Since our free flight had to originate and terminate in the same region, and we were going to Hawaii it had to be a flight to another Hawaiian island.  In our case we did a multi-city award ticket search on United, looked for a flight from West Palm Beach to Honolulu, then Honolulu to Maui, and finally Maui back to West Palm Beach.  Once I found award tickets on the flights I wanted, I started the booking process, and in the flight summary the West Palm Beach-Honolulu and Maui-West Palm Beach tickets showed at 22,500 miles each, and the Honolulu to Maui portion showed as 0 miles.  There are no ferries between the Hawaiian islands – so you have to fly if you want to island hop, the Excursionist Perk saved us about $80 per person.

I’m going to give you one more example that is a bit more complicated and invokes two more rules regarding the perk.  We recently decided to take a trip to Bali, Indonesia on award miles.  Since we knew about the Excursionist Perk, we immediately looked at the United region chart and found that Indonesia was in the South Asia region which included: Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Laos, Macau, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.  We immediately zeroed in on Singapore because, Crazy Rich Asians, duh! – and decided we were going to add that to our trip.   To make things even more complicated when we looked at the map, I saw we were so close to the Maldives, some place that I had always wanted to go, but it was not in the same region as Indonesia so we figured out a way to visit there as well.  We had enough miles to fly out on Business Class but would have to return on Economy class.  Here’s how it worked:

We did a multi-city search for flights from West Palm Beach to Bali, then Bali to Singapore and finally the Maldives to West Palm Beach.  (Notice there was no flight from Singapore to the Maldives, this is called an open-jaw flight because I am going to find my own transportation for one leg of the trip).  We were charged 75,000 miles for the Business class West Palm Beach to Indonesia leg, 40,000 miles for the Maldives to West Palm Beach leg, and received the Excursionist Perk for the Bali to Singapore leg costing 0 miles because:

1. The Excursionist Perk was not used in the region where my travel started (I used it in the Southeast Asian region and started in the United States)
2. My travel ends in the same region that it originated (I started and ended in the United States). It didn’t matter that I started in one region, flew to a second and then returned from a third – I could have even started in Florida and ended in New York if I wanted to because all of the United States is one region.
3. The origin and destination of my Excursionist flight started and ended in the same region. (Indonesia and Singapore are in the same region).

Here’s a breakdown:

As a recap we booked award Business class tickets to Bali and then used the Excursionist Perk to get to Singapore.  From Singapore we purchased airline tickets on our own from Singapore Airlines to get to the Maldives, then used economy award tickets to go back to the United States.  Had we wanted to spend the extra miles we could have paid for our Singapore-Maldives flight with miles as well, but we thought it was more cost effective in the long run to pay for the cheap flight and save the miles for another trip.  It’s important to note that if two or more one-way awards on one trip qualify for the Excursionist Perk, only the first occurrence will be free.  One final rule is that the Excursionist Perk can only be used if the cabin of service and award type of the free one-way award is the same or lower than the one-way award preceding it.  In our case because our first flight was a business class award, our Excursionist flight could be in either Business or Economy class.  If the Economy portion had been first, then the Excursionist perk would only apply to an Economy award. 

Have you ever booked a destination just because of the Perk?  Let me know where the Excursionist Perk took you!