Recently I was asked by fellow GuyWhoTravel.com’er Zak to assist him in booking an award ticket for this September using his United Miles.
He wanted to fly from Toronto to London, with a return from Dublin to Toronto. We ended up finding good flights for the dates he wanted, in Business Class over to Europe (via Washington on United), and in Economy on the way back (via Frankfort on Lufthansa and Air Canada). United charges 60,000 miles for round trip to Europe from North America in Economy at the Saver Award level, and 100,000 in Business, so for this hybrid booking, the cost would be 80,000 miles.
He was quite excited about this booking (especially since he earned most of those points through the Chase Sapphire card, which is dear to his heart). But he was even more excited when I told him that he could get half of another trip added into this award without spending any more miles!
Just to back up a bit, let me explain the stop-over rules for United awards. If you are booking a one-way reward, no stop-overs are allowed. But if you are booking a return ticket, they allow you to have one stopover and two open-jaws (an open-jaw is when there is a city pair in your itinerary that you are not actually flying between). Zak already had one open-jaw in his itinerary since he was flying into London and out of Dublin, so the key was how to maximize the other allowances.
The GuysWhoTravel.com team are planning a trip to Las Vegas in August, a month prior to Zak’s UK/Ireland trip, so I went to work trying to work that into his award ticket.
My strategy was that instead of booking him a Toronto->London, Dublin->Toronto award, I would instead book a Las Vegas->London, Dublin->Toronto award, with a stop-over in Toronto (for one month!) on the outbound flight. Because this itinerary involves one stop-over and two open-jaws (London->Dublin and Toronto->Las Vegas), it is legal under United’s rules, and would not cost him any additional miles.
Note that if we weren’t able to add a stop-over in Toronto on the way back and tack on another half-trip to Vegas. While this would have eliminated one of the open-jaws, it would have added a second stop-over, which is not allowed.
So in the end he spent the same 80,000 miles he was planning to, but he got a Las Vegas to Toronto flight for free!
This covers United’s rules, but note that other airlines have rules that are similar, although perhaps not as generous. For example, while American allows a stop-over on one-way rewards (and in fact all of their awards are booked as one-way awards), the stop over must be in the “North American International Gateway City”, which greatly decreases the number of cities available.
