Turn a TWO City Roundtrip Flight to a FOUR City Adventure

Have you heard of the United Airlines Excursionist Perk? If not, keep reading because you'll probably start using it from now on! In the easiest terms possible to explain, the perk allows you add a flight in between your award travel, for free. There are some terms and conditions associated with this but it's a bomb deal.

We are going to showcase this using the sample itinerary of Los Angeles (LAX) -> Hong Kong (HKG).

If you search this itinerary on United's website it would run you 80,000 miles.

Now, while this isn't bad, we can do better! If you use the Multi-city search feature and change up your itinerary a bit, you can now take advantage of the Excursionist Perk. One of the terms of using the perk is that the original flight and ending flight have to be in the same region (So if you start in LA, you gotta end there). The other term is that the middle flight has to be in the same region (Here is a list of how United defines regions). In this case, Hong Kong and Bangkok are part of the same region "South Asia"

Now, you have a trip from LAX -> HKG -> BKK -> LAX for the SAME amount of miles as you would've spent for just the original itinerary. But there is also an additional perk. The BKK to LAX flight has a 9 hour layover in Tokyo. Which means you get an ADDITIONAL city on your trip for FREE.

This itinerary would cost you around $3400 if you paid with money. Which is why I always stress for people to join loyalty programs with Airlines and Hotels. Because this just got even better.

Let's say you don't have 80,000 miles in your account and you don't want to shell out $3400 for this trip, there is another way. United has a deal going on where they will match the amount of miles you purchase. So, if you buy 40,000 miles they will give you 40,000 miles. And that cost is only $1500. So for $1500 you could take a trip worth $3424.67.

If this isn't enough of a reason for you to start joining, I don't know what will do it!