This morning, I posted about how United is now offering flights for as few as 3K miles each way on some routes and how that cheap award pricing would make for some potentially great Excursionist Perk opportunities. In the comments, a reader asked a question that led me to share an example and I thought it was worth a second post to outline a more concrete example of how this morning’s info could be leveraged to save many thousands of miles.
Excursionist Perk nesting
If you’ve read this morning’s post, you likely have your mind wrapped around the basic idea of the Excursionist Perk (and if you don’t yet understand it, read this post). I previously showed some ways that you could save big on a one-way with cheap United award pricing. However, that led me to an example in the comments of the morning post that paralleled Greg’s 40K to Far Away trick that shows how you could nest these to save a ton of miles. While you may not use this trick in the near-term as outlined below (and I’m sure I won’t either), it is a trick worth keeping in your tool belt and dusting off when the world starts to come back together because I expect that cheap domestic flights (and therefore cheap United awards) will likely persist for a relatively long time.
Part of what leads to big savings here is the cheap cost of United awards at the moment. There is also the fact that United has raised award pricing in many regions over the past couple of years, so there are opportunities to save big as compared to increased award costs.
If you don’t really have any need for a domestic US trip but are looking to get across an expensive region on the cheap, you can nest two Excursionist Perks for big savings.
For example, my “local” airport is Albany, NY (not exactly close, but the closest). I also have dreams of visiting the Seychelles later this year (big dreams at this point). Let’s say I wanted to take a side-trip from the Seychelles to South Africa so I could go back on safari for a couple of days. I could nest two trips to fly from Albany to Washington DC and back in the same day to save 23,000 miles on an intra-Africa flight from the Seychelles to South Africa. Here’s now.
Trip #1
The key to understanding this, much like what Greg did during the 40K to Far Away challenge, is that I would be booking two entirely separate trips that look connected but aren’t.
As I explained in this morning’s post, if I begin in North America (in Albany for instance) and end anywhere in North America, I can get a free flight (costing zero miles; I still need to pay any taxes) within some foreign region in between the first and last leg of my trip.
So, for example, I could book the following “trip” from Albany to Washington, DC in May and then take the free excursionist perk from Seychelles to Johannesburg in September and then fly from Albany to Orlando in November (my “return” leg that makes my trip end in North America).
The price for that single multi-city itinerary breaks down like this:
May 5, 2021
- Albany to Washington, DC: 3K miles + $5.60
- Leave Albany at 9:45am
- Arrive DC at 11:12am
September 22, 2021
- Seychelles to Johannesburg: 0 miles + $50 in taxes
November 1, 2021
- Newark to Orlando: 5K miles + $5.60
Total cost = 8,000 miles + $61.20
Here’s the screen shot:
But the problem with the above is that I need to fly from Albany to Washington DC in order to get the “free” trip from the Seychelles to Johannesburg. I can’t skip that flight. So that leaves me stranded in DC.
Enter Trip #2
Trip #2
In order to avoid being stranded in Washington DC on May 5th, and in order to get back to the Seychelles from South Africa, I could book this next totally separate but very much complementary trip:
Note the timing on the first flight of this second trip. Trip #1 in the previous section arrives in Washington DC at 11:12am. Trip #2 leaves DC to turn around and go home to Albany at 12:30pm the same day, which should give me plenty of time to find my gate and fly back to be home in time for dinner.
Again, it works like this:
May 5, 2021
- Washington DC to Albany: 3K miles + $5.60
- Leaves DC: 12:30pm
- Arrives ALB: 1:47pm
September 26, 2021
- Johanesburg to Seychelles: 0 miles + $47.10
November 3, 2021
- Orlando to Los Angeles: 5K miles + $5.60
Total cost = 8,000 miles + $58.30
Here’s the screen shot:
That second trip would make it possible to do a same-day turn in DC that would give me an entirely free flight from Seychelles to South Africa (I’d still have to pay the departure taxes of course, but no miles).
The November trip from Newark to Orlando and then from Orlando to Los Angeles — the last leg of both trips — would be gravy if it happens. I could alternatively just skip those flights since they happen after the trip to Seychelles / South Africa is done. Note that if I did that regularly, United might get mad at me. I wouldn’t be particularly worried about doing it once or twice.
My total cost for both trips would be 16,000 miles + $119.50.
Intra-Africa without Excursionist shenanigans
Let’s say that I didn’t want to mess with this whole Excursionist thing and just wanted to book a ticket from the Seychelles to South Africa. That trip would cost 39,000 miles and $97.10 round trip.
As you can see, I would save 23,000 miles by leveraging the Excursionist Perk by nesting two different trips instead. I’d also pay about $20 more (the taxes on the US flights). I’d say that’s a pretty good trade.
Bottom line
I’m 99.87656789209% sure that none of the above will happen in real-world 2021 (and 110% sure that as much as I love taking pictures in Kruger National Park I am not going to cut short my time in Seychelles to go to Kruger if by some miracle the Seychelles trip happens). The purpose of this post was to show why I was excited about the widespread existence of really low-mileage United flights (including some for just 3K each way). In the past, finding a 5K flight and then also being able to actually take that lead-off leg would have really required threading the needle. Now I can find flights from just 3K from my own backyard. That could mean a huge mileage savings in the right situation
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[…] The United Excursionist Perk: We’ve written about this before, but here’s a great article discussing the United Excursionist perk and how you could stretch your United miles even further. […]
Trying to wrap my head around this intriguing article. One think I have yet to understand…
How are you getting to Seychelles in Sept. to fly that part of you trip?
Thanks Nick.
Totally separate ticket. Has nothing to do with the excursionist perk. The point of this post in fact is that it doesn’t need to have anything to do with it. I could be using American Airlines miles or a cheap cash ticket or a screaming deal in some other way to get to the Seychelles. This is a way to enhance my Seychelles trip for very few miles. All that said, I’m probably not going to the Seychelles in 2021, it just provided for a good example.
You could use the same sort of technique for other situations. For example, last year Iberia was offering half off award tickets for travel this year. In that sale, I booked a business class ticket to Spain for 34,000 miles round trip via Iberia plus (that trip is now scheduled for late 2021). That was a slamming deal. But maybe I don’t want to only visit Spain. Using United to fly to let’s say Athens on a direct Aegean flight would cost 33,00 miles round trip from Spain. Instead, I could have used the same technique you see here and flown round trip for 16,000 United miles (and had both a domestic trip before it and maybe even had another trip lined up afterwards by nesting like you see here). You can essentially use a domestic US flight to save a ton on flights within some other region.
Interesting but hard to make work in practice. Who here would waste a day flying just to save 40k points?
I definitely try to do this when I can work it into normal travel.
LOL. I think you underestimate folks in this hobby.
But yes of course you can work it into birthday travel. If I’m looking to book a simple round trip like Albany to DC (for a couple of days perhaps), I’ll look to see if I can make use of this even if the other end is a throwaway.
Awesome job. LA to Las Vegas, Paris to Santorini, Las Vegas to LA: 8000 points and $75. Playing around with that led me to a totally unrelated question: do any star alliance programs permit a stopover on a round-trip anymore? Maybe the new Aeroplan?
Aeroplan allows a stopover in each direction for 5K miles.
Singapore allows a stopover. I think one is free and additional stopovers cost $100 each.
ANA allows a stopover (have to book round trip with ANA).
I’m not sure about EVA?
Those are the ones that pop into mind immediately, but there are a lot of Star Alliance airlines so possible I’m missing some.
Thanks!
Great job on this. I keep this off the blog and save it for FTU, but the is particularly valuable with the current sale going on now.
I wasn’t aware that it was a sale. Do you have a link to something about it? We’ve published a number of posts on this before (Greg did almost the same thing for our 40K to Far Away challenge in October 2019). I link to those in earlier post about the 3K awards.
Thanks for continuing to post useful content. One of the reasons I enjoy the FM site is that you clearly post information that is useful to your readers. I can’t ever recall a political based clickbait post or “let’s make me feel better about myself” articles on misbehaving children/passengers. Thanks for being such a trustworthy source of information.
I agree with you 100%. I’ve stopped using the boarding area main page to avoid all that other crap. Just limit my visits to a few sites that focus on travel and points/miles. FM is top of that list. Don’t care about a “screaming Karen” or a Frontier FA saying mean things.
It’s a one-day only sale. It’s listed on the United website as being for “National Plan For Vacation Day” (??).
https://www.united.com/en-us/plan-for-vacation-day?campaign_type=cce
I see! Stumbled on it by accident in the middle of the night.
Yeah, just a sale to get the cheap 3K prices. Still, even at 5-8K each way, it can still make sense.
Yeah, this is how I use it, except I try to end up with the last leg of each ticket combining to be another round trip, instead of your EWR-MCO-LAX. Since I’m SFO based, it usually means having a weekend away in Portland, Seattle, or LA at some point both before and after my bigger trip.
Last year I had an excursionist perk set up going from the Faroes to Azores: FAE-CPH-LIS-PDL with ~20 hours in CPH and LIS. Unfortunately Covid hit and I had to cancel. Hopefully I’ll be able to get that to line up again.
Very ingenious but, like you wrote, completely impractical: who can plan ahead THREE trips (what the examples show) in this time of Covid? A great example of mental masturbation.
Isn’t that kind of logic like, “I’m not hungry right now, so there’s no sense in learning how to cook”? The idea here isn’t to lay out a trip for you to plan tomorrow but rather to highlight a great program feature to leverage when travel returns. As I say in the post, these low-priced awards are likely to last well beyond whenever it is safe to travel again and that should present an opportunity to get excellent value for those who plan.
Of course, the idea is an interesting one! But I highly doubt it is practical in real life, tho. I just can’t imagine planning 3 trips ahead to such precision as is required here. Not to say it is not possible, just not practical.
I would love to learn how people have actually used this, as it may show me a way to plan travel that I am ignorant about. (I never consider 3 trips ahead so this is the part that intrigues me…do people REALLY do this?)
In this morning’s post, I linked to a post I wrote about 4 years ago where I used it a bit differently. I was already using United to book a business class ticket to South Africa. I needed an intra-Africa flight to catch the first leg of a cheap premium cabin fare. I realized that booking a throwaway domestic economy class leg far in the future would mean that I’d pay fewer miles for the Intra-Africa flight.
The point of this post here is that you don’t need to be booking three trips at all. In this case, the only actual trip is the Seychelles to Johannesburg trip and this shows you how to save 23,000 miles on that trip by doing a simple one-day turnaround in advance. Whether or not it’s worth your time to do that same day turnaround or whether you want to turn that into amits own trip with a few days in DC or do a real third trip after the Africa trip is a matter of personal preference.
Some people can plan 3 trips in advance. Alternately, one could plan one excursionist trip in the future, with a more near term “activation” trip, and a throwaway trip.
Here’s an example of 3 trips:
-Domestic getaway after COVID vaccine, could be a short weekend, etc.
-International Excursionist for future planned vacation
-Future plan to take a cruise, on 2 itineraries book round trip to US embark port.
Does that work for everyone, nope. But, it’s a lot more likely than some of the RTW take 8 months off of work type of mental gymnastics that get posted about.
This is truly amazing and innovative. I’m so glad I don’t have to figure this stuff out on my own!
you should try piecing the puzzle together on your own next time, youll probably learn something. This type of “exploit” has been around for a long time. You couldve easily figured it out on your own had you taken the time to think about it.
Thank you Thomas, it is very thoughtful of you to take time out of your busy day at McDonalds to help me out here.
Nice subtle self-depreciation there by insinuating that you can’t even out-wit a McDonald’s employee or patron. Perhaps award travel isn’t the only thing going above your head.
Thanks again Thomas. I’ll keep you in mind the next time I want a McRib.
After thinking about it, I’d like to apologize. I was being sarcastic and didn’t realize that you actually do work at McDonald’s. No shame in that my friend.
No wonder you couldn’t comprehend the very-straightforward excursionist perk, you couldn’t even comprehend my reply.
Enough, guys. The personal attacks are unnecessary, not adding to the conversation, and not the type of environment we aim for at Frequent Miler.
Yeah, I was just joshing around. In all seriousness though, these sorts of posts are great. Reminiscent of travel is free. Would love to see more of this content!
Edit: Comment removed by Nick.