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As a companion to the mega-popular Free Oneways on United Awards, I’ve made this video of me booking such an award. Now you can get started booking Three Vacations on Two Awards if you missed that over the weekend.
Nice Video!!
Can you make one for “before”
and maybe try an Asian itinerary??
Would this work?
NYC – LAX
LAX – PVG
TPE – LAX?
OK, check in a few hours.
Your blog is so educational.
Video +
Blog ++
Comments that follow, priceless
I’m glad Mommypoints pointed to this site.
I’m glad you found your way to the blog, so you can get the most out of your miles.
Scott,
After watching the video, I tried booking RT award on UA site and got the following error message
“united.com could not find any available flights for award travel meeting your requirements. You may modify your search criteria or review the MileagePlus Travel Award Rules.”
I also subs JFK with EWR and got the same error message. What did I do wrong?
Here are the itineraries
JFK – SIN on 2/20/2013
KUL – JFK on 3/6/2013
JFK – HNL on 4/3/2013 <- free one way
Thanks
Here’s the problem: On a United award, you can exceed the Maximum Permitted Mileage of a city pair by 15%. Technically your return is KUL-HNL, which has an MPM of 8,209. I don’t know your exact routing, but even if there were direct KUL-JFK-HNL flights, that routing would be 14,415 miles, which is way more than 15% more than the MPM. It’s all but impossible to route from Asia to the east coast to Hawaii. But you can probably get a free oneway to the west coast or somewhere on the east coast.
You can get free (or almost free) oneways to Hawaii on returns from Europe, South America, and Africa quite easily if you live in NYC.
Understood. I was not aware abt the MPM things. My return routing from KUL to DOH then JFK then HNL whch is definitely longer than 14,415.
One doubt, how did you get the 8209 MPM figure? According to gcmap, KUL-HNL is 6822 miles. Add 15%, 6822 + 1023 = 7845
MPM is something that airlines list for their paid fares. It is not the number of miles of a direct flight; it usually exceed that by a lot. I don’t know how they choose the MPM. But for AA awards, we add 25% to the MPM figure and compare that to the routing of our award. As you said, your routing greatly exceed 125% of MPM, so your routing is invalid. I don’t know a free service to find MPM, but if you go to expertflyer and look at a fare’s rules, it lists the MPM.
And I was thinking the wrong type of awards. For AA, add 25%, but for United awards, add 15% like you did.
Wow! I’m beginning to think that my United miles are worth a lot more than Avios since I figured out that Air New Zealand would be awesome to access since they might be one of the few airlines that fly between Bali and Auckland. Thank you.
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