The dust has settled and new pricing is in effect at United MileagePlus. I dragged my feet in booking and ended up with three award reservations at the last minute. I won’t keep them all, but I’d rather pay a $25 redeposit fee (for Gold members) than pay 20-25K more miles for the identical one-way trip later on.
Lately, my travel has tended to be less about destination and more about product. With the exception of two trips to Germany each year with my family, I have not been able to justify the time to actually take a trip purely for the destination. There always has to be an underlying product to justify it.
My last-minute bookings with United continue that trend.
Trip One: Thai First Class Sydney to Bangkok to Hong Kong – 40K miles
I was foolish for procrastinating, but I was genuinely surprised at how almost all of the Thai First Class space dried up the day before the devaluation. I don’t believe Thai pulled the space, even though there was ample first class space available just two days before. Instead, I think people just booked it up.
I’ve flown Thai First Class before–many, many times–but figured this may be my last chance in several years to try it.
Trip Two: Thai 787-8 + A350 Business Class Hanoi to Melbourne – 30K miles
In terms of choosing the most helpful product reviews for the blog, I figure business class is going to be more valuable than first class. I wanted an itinerary with both the 787-9 and A350, but had to settle for a 787-8 (which has a 2-2-2 business class product rather than 1-2-1 reverse herringbone product). The trip starts in Hanoi, which is a city I have wanted to visit more than a decade.
Trip Three: Thai 787-9 Business Class Hong Kong to Queenstown – 30K miles
Perhaps the single most valuable product I can review is the Thai 787-9. I love the A350 in almost all ways more than the 787-9, but Thai’s 787-9 has a much better seat. Hong Kong to Bangkok is a 777-300 which I’ve flown before several times and I added Auckland to Queenstown for the heck of it — it would be nice if I can work in the time to visit, but can always end the trip in Auckland.
Exploiting the Excursionist Perk
Above is what I initially booked, but then it dawned on me at the absolute last moment…why not use the Excursionist Perk?
United now calls stopovers an “Excursionist Perk”. I’ve outlined details here. Put simply, the Excursionist Perk is a free one-way trip within a single region that is not the region you started it. It’s complicated…
Trip One
For Trip One, I added a free segment from Ulaanbaatar in Mongolia to Guangzhou, China. I figure that rather than spending time in Hong Kong, I’ll head up to Mongolia but need to get back to take the second ticket from Hong Kong to either Melbourne or Queenstown.
Why didn’t I book it from Ulaanbaatar to Hong Kong? Because Mainland China and Mongolia are in North Asia and Hong Kong is classified in South Asia.
That normally would have added 22.5K additional miles, but because I also added an 8K segment from Queenstown to Auckland, the 22.5K price tag was zeroed. How? In order to get the free Excuristionst Perk, you must simply have a segment that ends the trip in your region of departure.
So my trip started in Sydney (Australia/New Zealand region) and ends in Auckland (same region).
Trip Two + Three
For Trip Two, I added a free segment from Johannesburg to Dakkar in business class, normally 30K miles. To get the 30K segment for “free” I also had to add a domestic one-way segment on Thai from Bangkok to Koh Samui.
Wait, what?
Yes, there is no georgprahic restriction of any kind on the Excursitionst Perk–it just must be a one-way award within a single region. I figured this would give me a chance test out South African’s new A330 business class at a later date.
For the third trip, since I do not plan to fly both Trip Tw0 and Trip Three, I booked an identical Excursionist Perk from Johannesburg to Dakar.
CONCLUSION
If you’re unclear what exactly the Excursionist Perk, come hear my talk on it at FTU Expo in a few weeks in Chicago.
I am amused by my last-minute redemptions and hope to ultimately fly on at least two of the tickets. Of course the positioning costs on a trip like this have the chance to become enormous…but maybe it will lead to other opportunities, like TAAG Angola Airlines.
Did you book anything crazy before the devaluation?
If you have to choose between Trip Two and Trip Three, I’d recommend Trip Three. While there are a couple reviews of Thai’s A350 out there (including Lucky’s), you’d be the first to review Thai’s 787-9 business class, which would be awesome.
I ended up booking Thai Airlines First Class from Sydney – Bangkok – Hong Kong in June. You’re right about the 1st availability drying up. I have been looking for a few months now but never pulled the trigger, but there were always plenty of options. But in 2018 Feb/Mar/Apr/May there was nothing.
At least it’ll give me time to figure out a way to get to Sydney. 😉
I don’t get how you got TripOne to price out at 40K. If you added another segment at the end of TripOne from Queenstown to Auckland, isn’t that going to price separately? How is it connected to the original Sydney to Bangkok to Hong Kong?
Are you able to later add on the “Excursionist perk” after an award booking without any repricing or additional charges?
8K more. Was 48K.
Yeah, the devaluation definitely bites big time…was planning trip recently that was doable at 100k miles, and this morning suddenly was 120k where the fee to buy additional miles was just a few dollars shy of the fare for flights on a better airline offering nonstop flights for all segments instead of the connection United’s award required for one of the legs of the trip…
…been busy last few weeks, including a death within my family, so failed to catch the news of the looming devaluation and missed out…
….oh, well, maybe it’s just time to burn the miles using the catalog United sends me in the mail since using them to fly anywhere exciting that I endured United’s steady decline in service to keep/earn for this long ago anticipated trip is pointless…everything they’ve been intended to be used for is either cheaper to buy on other airlines anyway once the fees, limited availability, or the periodic devaluations are factored in…
We much prefer Southwest, Delta & JetBlue anyway, so ridding ourselves of our Mileage Plus miles would free us of the need to fly United to either keep the miles from expiring, or to keep chasing our dream trip which, with this latest devaluation, is less dream, and more mirage as far as using miles is concerned…
…so cashing in miles on a few goodies we want (other than magazines & newspapers which us where we burned AAdvantage miles after one too many horrible experiences on American put that airline on our “No-Fly” list…and when we say “No-Fly”, for us it’s more like, never, ever…based on first-hand experiences that were just flat out, consistently awful…) is beginning to look appealing now…
Too bad for United…I may not fly as much as my partner does, but he does transcons every 6-8 weeks on Delta at whatever fare the airline is charging for the flights he needs, and also has been around the world a few times in the past 2-years…mostly on SkyTeam airlines now…
United has been much better in handling his disability (he had Polio as a young child and one of his legs was impacted) since the Dr. Dao incident, but before that was pretty bad in recent years…We gave up on American after the new management “US Airwaysed” it and constantly left him in the lurch by failing to provide wheelchairs at all very often (like they did at US Airways nearly always the few times we flew that airline before it faded away)…
So using up our combined MileagePlus accounts, and closing them out might just be the best option now…
Southwest and Delta are far better airlines, especially for travelers with disabilities in our experience.
We love Southwest for the few limited nonstop options available in NYC; and after trying the ten abreast 777 beasts United flies to/from SFO now twice earlier this past summer, even in E+, he requested Delta instead for those trips.
Sure Delta’s miles are next to worthless, too, but at least it’s a much better airline than United…and certainly American.
Maybe it’s time for most flyers who don’t fly full-fare coach, or who’s companies do NOT allow biz/1st class travel, to simply ditch chasing miles for dream trips to exciting destinations on their bucket lists…with each passing year they’re becoming worth less and less anyway for most, and now so much so, that for all intents & purposes, there’s so little space left between the race to the bottom and the bottom itself, the miles are all but worthless now anyway…