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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.
How does the United Excursionist Perk work?
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 London to Paris leg for free. You'd just have to take the train back to New York.
Here's my own real-world scenario: Our roundtrip economy flights from Phoenix to New Zealand (in region terms: Mainland US, Alaska & Canada to Australia & New Zealand) would have cost 80,000 miles each no matter what. So we used miles to book the following flights: Phoenix to Sydney, Sydney to Christchurch, then Auckland to Phoenix, building the itinerary with three legs in total. (We drove from Christchurch to Auckland.) The cheapest flight of the bunch was the one from Sydney to Christchurch, so that's flight we got for zero miles; we just had to pay the taxes and fees for the reservation.
We got a three-city tour for just 80,000 United miles and $174.15 in taxes and fees each, $82.11 of which was specific to Australia.
How we got the points to fly from the US to Australia and New Zealand
To get to the 160,000 total points we needed for our reservations, my husband and I looked at credit card welcome offers.
We signed up for three new cards for the two of us. My husband started with the United Explorer credit card, which, at the time, had an increased sign-up bonus of 60,000 miles. We also both work as freelancers, which made us eligible for the no-annual fee Chase Ink Business Unlimited with a sign-up bonus of 90,000 points when we applied for a card each. That netted us a total of 180,000 Chase Ultimate Rewards points.
For my husband’s reservation, we transferred 20,000 Chase points to his United account; with his United sign-up bonus worth 60,000 miles, he had his 80,000 miles ready to go for his reservation to Australia and New Zealand. For mine, I transferred 60,000 Chase points to my United account, which already had about 20,000 miles waiting to be used, leaving both of us plenty of Chase points for another trip.
Triggering the Excursionist Perk
After spending weeks drooling over the route (and quadruple-checking each leg for availability), I was in for a rude awakening when I signed into United to book it: I couldn’t get the perk to trigger on the app or the website. A quick Reddit dive revealed that others had faced the same problem, so I geared up my millennial self for a phone call with United’s customer service team.
The first several representatives I spoke to had no idea what I was talking about. It took more than an hour on the phone to find someone who could help me make the booking. Now, it seems that United has fixed whatever was causing the perk not to trigger; when I searched several routes on a multi-city booking as a test (and maybe to plan my next trip), none cost extra miles for the cheapest leg. I wouldn’t recommend calling unless you absolutely must; if you do, you'll want to make extra sure there is mileage seat availability for each of your legs.
The bottom line
The United Excursionist Perk is a great way to add another city or country into your travel without dipping back into your miles and points. While we only spent three days in Sydney, there isn’t a time limit for the perk. It’s hard to beat the allure of a bonus country added to your trip.
