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Last week, we posted on how you can leverage the United Excursionist Perk for strong value. Using the Excursionist Perk, you should be able to book a free one-way flight when you book a trip that begins and ends in the same region. Unfortunately, in the days following that post, United’s pricing engine stopped pricing Excursionist legs properly and the system has been charging for the portion of the journey that should be free. The Points Guy reports that United is aware that the system is currently overcharging on these itineraries and has said that the system will be fixed this week.
In the above example, you can see that the United booking system seems to recognize that the included leg should be 0 miles (see the top row of days), but as you can see it is showing up as 15K / 25K miles in search results. This was part of an itinerary from Chicago->Zurich->Lisbon-Chicago, the basic example I used in last week’s post illustrating the concept at its simplest.
Unfortunately, even the easiest itineraries like the one above are not pricing out correctly, thus neither are some of the more creative routings from last week’s post.
Fortunately / unfortunately, TPG notes that United is aware of this glitch and that they will be fixing it this week. Time will tell how thoroughly it gets “fixed”. In the meantime, TPG suggests calling United reservations at 1-800-864-8331 if you have an immediate need to ticket, though I wouldn’t hold my breath on that happening without significant time spent on hold and escalation. It’s probably best to wait and see what happens later this week into next week.
H/T: The Points Guy
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So…. exactly what I pointed out in the comments on your blog post?
Also, how do you spell correctlty correctly?
You killed it, like you kill everything. Mission Accomplished, brilliant bloggers!
The “you killed it” crowd is out quick today. Probably the same people who only like lounges as long as they shut off access right after they get through the doors.
Never mind that, even if articles showing how to legitimately use a perk advertised by the company do “kill” the perk, TPG did a MASSIVE and massively quoted article about using the excursionist perk a while back. They just saw you write about it so obviously it’s your fault.
Kids today…
You beat me to it! TiF did a bunch of posts, not widely read; but TPG has several posts and lord knows the TPG posts has readership numbers similar to MMS.
I read about this perk and “manipulating” it months after it came out on MMS unless I am mistaken on the timing, but it wasn’t at LEAST a year ago.. so yah, doubt FM killed it.
Or you guys just killed it… just like the jetblue thing. thanks
Bad timing for me! Was going to book a nice freebie out to Montana on the back of my trip home from Oktoberfest after reading your post, and couldn’t get the pricing to work!
No doubt they’re working on Enhancements.
Thanks for killing it. Less than 48 hours after you posted about, United basically disabled the perk while they program a way to stop creative routes like the ones you listed.
Sigh, was planning to use this for my RTW next year.. If this dies then it’s really an end of an era and so does all my miles stockpiled..