I just put together an amazing itinerary for my brother for his proposed summer 2015 trip and this is a perfect example of how travel rewards points can save you money and take you places you could only dream of!
He’s a teacher and he wanted to go to either Europe or Asia next summer using his points, so my response was, “why not both??”
Using the United Free Stopover
United Airlines has an incredible bonus built into their round-trip international award bookings called a “free stopover.” It is basically an entirely free flight built into your award booking! We tested this out and here are the amazing results:
It costs only 80,000 United miles and just $120.70 to go from the US to Portugal, Portugal to Thailand and then Thailand back to the US!
Normally it would cost 80,000 miles to just fly round-trip just from the US to Thailand. On this trip, thanks to the free stopover in Portugal, he is able to get this trip to Europe for zero additional points!
This plan calls for him to fly from the greater New York City area out of Newark Airport to Lisbon, Portugal where he’ll visit for a week and then will fly from Portugal to Bangkok and then two weeks later fly back from Bangkok to Newark.
It took us about 10 minutes to mock this up on the United website and here are some screenshots so you can see for yourself:
Here’s the actual itinerary:
If you head over to our travel rewards video training page you’ll find a few short 5-minute videos showing you exactly how to search the United website in general and how to find these ‘free stopovers’ to put together amazing trips like this one.
If you want to get started with your own personalized travel rewards plan, click here to sign up for our completely free (no gimmicks) travel rewards coaching program!
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