Changes to Excursionist Perk

United Airlines changed the rules to its famous excursionist perk benefit without giving any notice. Sadly, these changes don't look great (or else they would have made a big deal about it!). I have been playing on United's website to test the limits of the perk under the new rules, but I can't get a single itinerary to price a free flight correctly. So we will keep an eye on United's website and update this post as we learn more. In the meantime, let's take a look at what these changes to the excursionist perk mean.

United Excursionist Perk

For those unfamiliar, the excursionist perk is a free one-way award flight within select multi-city itineraries if you follow United's rules. The gist of the rules remains the same: your complete itinerary must start and end in the same award zone (as defined on United's website), the free one-way flight must be entirely within the same zone, and the free one-way flight must be in a different zone than where your itinerary begins.

The classic example is booking a flight from the US to Europe–say, London–then a flight from London to Paris, and then a flight from Paris back to the US. Under the excursionist perk, that middle flight from London to Paris can cost zero miles.

United Changes the Rules

So how did United change the excursionist perk's rules? Here is a comparison of the previous rules with the new ones.

Old Rules	New Rules
Travel must end in the same MileagePlus defined region where travel originates.	Your trip starts and ends in the same region.
The origin and destination of the Excursionist Perk is within a single MileagePlus defined region.	The free Excursionist Perk flight starts and ends in the same region
The cabin of service and award inventory of the free one-way award is the same or lower than the one-way award preceding it.	Your trip starts in a different region than the free Excursionist Perk flight
If two or more one-way awards qualify for this benefit, only the first occurrence will be free.	The free Excursionist Perk flight must be in a lower award tier or cabin than the flight before it.

That last new rule about award tier and cabin looks troubling to me. This new rule replaces the third rule in the old column, which stated that the cabin of the free one-way award was the same or lower than that of the flight preceding it. So what does this mean?

Understanding the New Excursionist Perk Rules

Under the old rules, in the US-London-Paris-US example above, the London-Paris flight could be in the same class of service (or below) as the the US-London flight.

But now, United tells us the free flight must be in a lower award tier or cabin than the flight before it. This means the London-Paris flight must be either in a lower cabin or lower award tier.

What exactly does United mean by “lower award tier”? I searched through the terms and conditions for United's MileagePlus program and did not find a reference to “award tier” anywhere. I also cannot find that term anywhere else on United's website.

My biggest fear here is that United is making the free excursionist flight only available when the flight before it is at a higher award rate. For example, if your excursionist flight is a saver award, then the preceding flight cannot be a saver award. If this is the case, then the excursionist perk has lost almost all of its value.

As it is, requiring the free flight to be in a lower cabin of service than the preceding flight is already a huge blow to the perk. Under the new rules, if you book your first flight in business class, the excursionist perk can only be in economy or maybe premium economy if that cabin is even offered. Most airlines no longer offer first class service, so the opportunity to book tie an excursionist perk to a first class flight are pretty small.

United Devaluation: ToP Thoughts

United's unannounced changes to the excursionist perk rules are a big blow to a fun feature of the MileagePlus program. It remains to be seen how big of a blow this is since United's website doesn't appear to be pricing out excursionist itineraries properly at the moment. This probably relates to the implementation of the new rules. We will keep playing with United's website to better understand these changes. But there isn't much good news here for award travelers, unfortunately.