Maximizing (and understanding) United Excursionist Perks

United has a cool feature, called an Excursionist Perk, where you can get a free middle flight when booking an international multi-city trip with miles. For example, suppose you’re planning a trip to Africa where you’ll visit both South Africa and the Seychelles. With an Excursionist Perk award, you’ll pay the regular point price for the flight from the U.S. to South Africa, and the regular point price for the flight from the Seychelles back to the U.S., but the intermediate flight from South Africa to the Seychelles will be free (except for taxes and fees). In this post I’ll show you the basics and how to push this feature to its limits for maximum value.

United’s explanation of Excursionist Perks

United has this to say about Excursionist Perks (Don’t worry, I’ll explain all this below):

The Excursionist Perk is a free one-way award within select multi-city trips between at least two award regions. Members who book a trip with three or more one-way awards can get the first award for free, if the trip meets all these conditions:

• Your trip starts and ends in the same region.
• The free Excursionist Perk flight starts and ends in the same region.
• Your trip starts in a different region than the free Excursionist Perk flight.
• The free Excursionist Perk flight’s cabin and award tier must be the same or lower than the flight before it.

Note: I believe there’s an error in United’s explanation, above. Where it says “can get the first award for free” should say “can get the second award for free.”

United MileagePlus regions

To understand Excursionist Perks, it’s necessary first to understand United MileagePlus regions. United maintains a list of regions along with which countries, islands, and territories belong in each region. You can find a full list here. Alternatively, check out this region map that I created:

Each region is shown with a different color and symbol in the center of each country or area that is defined. For example, the North America region is shown with white on blue houses in each area that the region encompasses: Mainland US, Alaska, and Canada.  In some cases, regions are tiny. For example, Hawaii is its own region. Similarly, Japan is its own region. Other regions are huge: Europe, Oceana, and “Central & Southern Africa” are each gigantic.

Excursionist Perk Award Basics

Here’s a simplified explanation of Excursionist Perks:

• If you book a multi-city award that begins and ends in the same region, then:
• You can book a free one-way segment in the middle of your trip as long as that free segment is in a different region from where you began.
• Your free segment must not cross regions.

A simple example

Suppose you want to fly economy from the US to Johannesburg, South Africa. From there, you want to fly to the Seychelles. And, finally, you want to fly home. If you book each of these flight separately, you’ll pay a total of 120,000 United miles:

• DC (IAD) to Johannesburg (JNB): 45,000 United Miles
• Johannesburg (JNB) to the Seychelles (SEZ): 30,000 United Miles
• Seychelles (SEZ) to DC (IAD): 45,000 United Miles

However, if you build the above itinerary in United’s multi-city award search, you’ll get that middle flight for free.  For example, I went to United’s Advanced Search screen and plugged in the following dates and destinations:

The search result had me first select a flight from DC to Johannesburg for 45K miles.

Next, though, it offered the flight from Johannesburg to the Seychelles for 0 miles.  I would only have to pay $48.30 in taxes:

And for the return, I was offered “special cardmember pricing” of 45,000 miles:

In total, the above trip costs 90,000 miles vs. 120,000 miles without the Excursionist Perk benefit. By bundling the flights together into a single award with the Excursionist Perk, this example shows a savings of 30,000 miles.

The above example works because the trip started and ended in one region (North America) and the free segment was wholly within another region (“Central and Southern Africa”). Note that you do not need non-stop flights to make Excursionist Perk awards work. All three parts of the itinerary shown above involve multiple flight segments.

Throw-away ending (economy)

Suppose you intend to come back from the Seychelles some other way. Perhaps you found a great award flight using some other miles, for example.

In that case, by default you wouldn’t be able to use the Excursionist Perk since it requires beginning and ending your travel in the same region. Without the Excursionist Perk, it would cost 45,000 + 30,000 = 75,000 miles to fly DC to Johannesburg and then later to the Seychelles.

Luckily, there’s an easy trick to save miles with an Excursionist Perk. You can add a final “throw-away” flight to your itinerary in order to invoke the Excursionist Perk award. The only requirement is that the final flight must happen later in time than the Excursionist flight and it must end in the region where you began. In this example, it must end in North America. It doesn’t have to end in DC, just somewhere in North America.

Notice too that there’s no rule specifying where this final flight must begin. You don’t have to return from Africa to the US to make this work. The trick is to look for the cheapest possible award flight that ends in North America. This can include flights that are wholly within North America!

With some persistence, it’s possible to find awards within North America that cost only 5,000 miles one-way. Seats.Aero’s Explore feature makes it easy to find these awards. For example, I found a number of dates where flights from San Francisco to Burbank cost only 5,000 miles. So, let’s add this SFO-BUR flight to the end of the itinerary and see how it prices out:

Flight 1: DC to Johannesburg for 45,000 miles

Flight 2: Johannesburg to the Seychelles for 0 miles

Flight 3: San Francisco to Burbank for 5,000 miles (throw-away)

Total: 50,000 miles

Thanks to adding the flight from San Francisco to Burbank, the intra-Africa flight from Johannesburg to the Seychelles once again prices out at 0 miles. So we pay 45,000 miles to get to Africa, 0 miles to fly across Africa, and 5K miles for the final flight that happens to be wholly within North America.

If we hadn’t added that final flight to the itinerary, we would pay a total of 75,000 miles to fly DC to Johannesburg and then Johannesburg to the Seychelles. With the final flight added in, we pay only 50,000 miles.

It’s not necessary to ever fly that final flight from San Francisco to Burbank in order to get big savings like those shown above. However, obviously if you can find and book a flight that you actually want to take, the value is that much greater.

Throw-away ending (business-class)

It’s possible to do the same trick described above to fly business class. When booking Excursionist Perks, the free middle leg is in the same class of service as the first leg of your trip. As a result, it’s possible to add a throw-away economy flight to the end while flying business class for your first two flights. Here’s an example:

Flight 1: DC to Johannesburg in business class

The normal price for the above business class partner award would be 88,000 miles, but since I’m a United cardmember, it priced at 80,000 miles.

Flight 2: Johannesburg to the Seychelles in business class

The business class flight shown above would normally cost 65,000 miles. Here it is free, except for taxes, thanks to the Excursionist Perk.

Flight 3: San Francisco to Burbank (throw-away)

The last leg of an excursionist perk doesn’t have to be booked in the same class of service as the first two. So when booking a throw-away end-flight, there’s no reason not to book the cheapest economy flight available. In this case, it cost only 5,000 miles.

Total 85,000 miles

Thanks to adding the flight from San Francisco to Burbank, the intra-Africa flight from Johannesburg to the Seychelles prices out at 0 miles. So we pay 80,000 miles to get to Africa in business class, 0 miles to fly across Africa in business class, and 5K miles for the final throw-away flight.

If we hadn’t added that final flight to the itinerary, we would pay a total of 145,000 miles to fly DC to Johannesburg and then Johannesburg to the Seychelles. With the final flight added in, we pay only 85,000 miles. That’s a savings of 60,000 miles!

Throw-in beginning

Suppose you don’t want to use United miles to get to Africa, but you do want to use United miles to fly across Africa. Imagine, for example, that you found a great deal on a paid flight to Johannesburg. Is there some way still to take advantage of United Excursionist Perks?  Well, yeah…

In the same way that the end flight of the Excursionist Perk award can be wholly within one region, the beginning kick-off flight can also be entirely within one region.

Economy flights from Newark to DC are sometimes as cheap as 5,600 points one-way. So, let’s see what it costs to book this route: Newark to DC, then Johannesburg to the Seychelles, then San Francisco to Burbank…

As you can see above, the itinerary now prices out at 10,600 miles total. The flight from Newark to DC costs 5,600 miles. The economy flight from Johannesburg to the Seychelles is free (other than taxes). And the flight from San Francisco to Burbank costs 5,000 miles.

In total, this example demonstrates a way to save nearly 20,000 miles for that flight across Africa (which would normally cost 30,000 miles).

You can save exactly 20,000 miles by choosing an initial flight that costs 5,000 miles (instead of 5,600), but I purposely picked a different route in order to highlight a very important point: Unlike the the throw-away ending flight, the throw-in beginning flight must be flown. If you skip this flight, the rest of the itinerary will be cancelled. Therefore, it’s not practical to search all over the country for the cheapest beginning flight. You need to find one that you’ll actually fly and you have to fly it before doing the free flight across Africa.

You can do the same thing with business class flights, but to do so, your first flight would have to be business class or regional first class. The cheapest I can find of those are 30,000 miles one-way. So, using this trick, you could fly first class within the US, then business class across Africa for a total of only 35,000 miles. That’s a bargain!

Two nested Excursionist Perks

In Frequent Miler’s first ever team challenge, 40K to Far Away, I nested two complete Excursionist Perk awards because I wanted to fly across Africa twice. Here were my two separate awards:

• Award 1 (10K miles): DC to Lewisburg (5K), Dakar to Johannesburg (free), Chicago to Houston (5K)
• Award 2 (10K miles): Lewisburg to DC (5K), Cape Town to the Seychelles (free), Houston to Chicago (5K)

I explained how this worked in the post How I Rocked 40K to Far Away with United Excursionist Perks.

Acknowledgement

Thanks go to Drew at Travel is Free for clearly explaining the possibilities that Excursionist Perks offer. The ideas I presented above originated in Drew’s seminal post: Complete Guide To United Stopover Tricks.

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