Visiting four cities in Europe on a single trip
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Visiting Multiple European Cities On a Single United Airlines Award Ticket

ByThe Miles Professor

I generally travel to Europe at least once a year and I will frequently use United Airlines miles for the trip. United Airlines is a member of the Star Alliance network, which has many European partners and good coverage with award space. The United MileagePlus program also has generous stopover and open jaw rules allowing us to stretch our itinerary across multiple cities in Europe! For many of us, Europe is quite far away and, when we’re there, we want to make the most of our time and see as much as possible. In this post, we’ll learn how to make sure we’re getting the most from our miles and using all our options to turn our trip to Europe into a multi-city excursion!

Understanding Stopovers and Open Jaws: How to Visit Multiple Cities

On a round-trip itinerary between different regions, United Airlines allows a stopover and two open-jaws. Any stopovers  of 24 hours or less will not count as our one stopover.

What is an open jaw? An open-jaw is when you fly into one city and return from another. Let’s think about how we’d like to visit Europe. We may fly to Paris, travel around, end up in Barcelona and fly home. That is, we’re flying into Paris and returning from Barcelona and that’s what United calls an open jaw. This is quite a nice option as it allows us to do a bit of travel on our vacation and return from the city we end up in – we don’t need to return to the original city just to fly back.

What is a stopover? A stopover is when you have a stop for multiple days either on the way to your destination or on the way back from your destination. If we have the time, it essentially lets us spend days or weeks or months in a city that’s simply along the way to our destination. If we’re flying to Paris from Los Angeles, for example, we can spend a few days along the way either in Europe or North America ranging from New York to London to Paris to Copenhagen.

What is a stopover under 24 hours? A stopover under 24 hours is the same as a stopover, but shorter. We can have as many of these as we like without counting against us and allows us to quickly stop in a city for less than 24 hours. Many people don’t like such a quick stop, but some really love it.

Putting all this together, what does this mean? On a single United Airlines round-trip award ticket from the US to Europe, we can see multiple cities.

We can book a ticket that includes all our flights between two cities with examples like:

  • LAX to London (stop for a few days) London to Paris (destination) Paris to LAX. This includes one stopover and no open-jaws.
  • LAX to Copenhagen (stop for a few days) Copenhagen to Madrid (destination) Madrid to LAX. This includes one stopover and no open-jaws.

If we are willing to pay for our own train or flight between other cities, we can include even more cities. That is, we can stop in one city on the way to our destination, travel around at our own cost and then fly back from a third city. A few examples:

  • LAX to London (stop for a few days) London to Paris (destination) Madrid to LAX. This includes one open-jaw and one stopover.
  • LAX to Copenhagen (destination) Vienna to Lisbon (stopover for a few days) Lisbon to San Francisco. This includes two open-jaws and one stopover.

An Example of Our Itinerary to Europe Visiting Four Cities

Svetlana is flying to Europe this summer from Los Angeles and visiting a number of cities. She is going to be visiting Vienna, Nice, Ibiza and London. Other than the flight from Nice to Ibiza, everything else is covered with just one United Airlines award ticket that she booked for 60,000 miles plus taxes. Here is her itinerary:

  • Fly from Los Angeles to Vienna, stop for 3 days.
  • Fly from Vienna to Nice.
  • Fly from Ibiza to London, stop for 18 hours.
  • Fly home from London to Los Angeles.

Although she’s technically visiting four cities here, this is considered only one round-trip and here is how it breaks down into the two legs:

  • Outbound leg: Los Angeles to Nice with a stopover in Vienna on the way.
  • Inbound: Ibiza to Los Angeles with an under 24 hours stopover in London.

She is using exactly one open-jaw (between Nice and Ibiza) and one stopover (Vienna on the way to Nice). Since she is in London for under 24 hours, London doesn’t count as a stopover and comes for free. For that reason, the ticket costs 60,000 United Airlines miles + taxes. She does need to still buy a ticket from Nice to Ibiza as that’s not included, but that’s the only flight she will need to buy.

Visiting four cities in Europe on a single trip
Visiting four cities in Europe on a single trip with United miles

How to Search for Award Availability and Book Tickets

Searching for Award Space

You can search the Star Alliance award space right on the United website, even for partner space availability. The one issue is that the website is a little bit quirky when it comes to a multi-segment award itinerary. For that reason, it’s best to search one segment at a time. In Svetlana’s case, she could search:

  • LAX to Vienna
  • Vienna to Nice
  • Ibiza to London
  • London to LAX

To search the first segment, for example, we visit the United Airlines website and type in Los Angeles to Vienna with a potential date. We also check the radio button for Award Travel and indicate we are just looking for a one-way flight (since we’ll search one segment at a time).

An available flight from Los Angeles to Vienna
An available flight from Los Angeles to Vienna

We are then looking for flights at the low-level award space, which will show up in Blue. The yellow ones are much higher priced high-level standard award space when seats are not available.

We would separately search for each segment and piece the individual flights together. That is, Svetlana would find and write down all the award flights she finds and the flight numbers and then call customer service at 1-800-United1 to book.

How Much It Will Cost

You can check the price of award tickets on the United Airlines award chart, but here is the general cost breakdown:

An economy round-trip Saver space ticket from the US to Europe will cost 60,000 United MileagePlus miles round-trip regardless of which class of service you fly. This includes the one stopover and two open jaws.

Business pricing is a bit more complex and depends on which carrier you fly across the Atlantic. The easiest way is to think of pricing as two separate one-way legs:

  • If you fly United Airlines Business Class across the Atlantic ocean, the one way ticket will cost 57,500 miles.
  • If you fly partner Business Class across the Atlantic ocean, the one way ticket will cost 70,000 miles.

The two legs will add together for the full price. As an example, if you fly NYC-FRA (Lufthansa), FRA-VIE (Lufthansa) and then LON-NYC (United), the ticket will cost 70,000 miles + 57,500 miles = 127,500 miles. On the other hand if you fly, NYC-Milan (United), Milan-Vienna (Austrian Airlines) and LON-NYC (United), the round-trip will cost 57,500 + 57,500 miles = 115,000 miles.

Calling Customer Service

Once we call customer service, we just need to get to the Mileage Plus award booking line and give the agent the individual flight numbers. Then agent should then be able to price the full itinerary and charge us the correct miles and taxes for the full trip.

The one thing I want to stress is it’s important to do your own research and find all your flights before calling customer service. You want to just be able to give the agent the flights you’ve found. In my experience, customer service agents are not very good at searching  partner award availability so you want to rely on your own searches for this to make the process as smooth as painless as possible.

Earning United Airlines Miles

United Airlines has its own co-branded credit card with Chase. In addition, United Airlines is a 1:1 transfer partner of Chase Ultimate Rewards.

Paying for Taxes and Fuel Surcharges

Although you can definitely stretch your miles to visit multiple cities across Europe on a single award ticket, the one thing you do have to pay is taxes. These include transit taxes, departure taxes, security charges and so on. In Svetlana’s case, these added up to an additional $211 once all the transits and departures were accounted for. Basically, each city you transit through or visit charges some tax. After going through five countries – UK, Austria, France, Spain and Germany  – the taxes do add up.

$211 in taxes for a multi-city European award itinerary
$211 in taxes for a multi-city European award itinerary

Taxes is the one thing that the United miles won’t cover, but using 60,000 miles is definitely a great deal! To visit all those cities in the summer from the West Coast, Svetlana would have easily spent $1500-$2000 at a minimum for tickets. Instead she paid 60,000 miles + $211 and just had to buy a ticket from Nice to Ibiza.

There’s also good news about paying for the $211 in taxes as there is a way to use miles to cover them. This is exactly the kind of situation when the Barclaycard Arrival World MasterCard becomes useful. The card comes with a sign-up bonus of 40,000 Barclaycard Arrival miles and those miles can be used to pay for any travel expense by just putting the expense on your card and going online to redeem the miles.

For more great ideas on how to use United Airlines miles, check out these posts:

9 Comments

  1. I’ve noticed that United’s search engine does not display any multiple-city results. Even though, I can get find a lot of flight options for the separate legs, I keep on receiving the same ‘error message’ with an indication to call a customer service.

    1. Yes, unfortunately, United’s search engine is notoriously terrible for multi-city award searches. It’s really best to search one segment at a time, piece together your flights and call customer service to book.

  2. How about such itinerary, first flight GDN-MUC and another one two days later fom FRA to NYC and finally a return flight NYC-FRA-GDN??? All the flights with LH.
    Sould it be considered a round trip for 100K UA miles in business class (back in January!)? Apparently, they were not able to price correctly (unless I am wrong!) and I had to book GDN-MUC for 20K plus the rest of the trip for 100K.

    1. The reason yours was more difficult was that you have an open jaw at the actual stopover point, which often causes problems. Although that’s technically sometimes doable, it’s far harder to pull off as it may requiring calling a few times and getting a nice helpful agent. Again, it’s not that it’s impossible to have an open jaw at the stopover, it’s just very difficult and rare to convince an agent to allow it, unfortunately.

  3. I know you can fly to North Asia via Europe from East Coast of U.S. But is it possible to do that from West Coast? I assume it’s harder because Europe is not on the way to North Asia.

  5. Awesome post! A couple questions for you:
    Can your outbound and inbound flights be in different classes and still price as a “round-trip” itinerary? (Ex: fly to Europe business class, fly home first class).
    Is it possible to book one leg of the journey today for 330 days out, and add the other leg of the journey in 6 months with the stopover/open-jaw on the second leg? (Because I don’t have the points today or want to book the return flight farther out than is possible to book or something) Could you combine the two to form a “round-trip” itinerary if they’re booked separately like that?

    1. Glad you enjoyed the post. Yes, you can do that. Fly in business class and fly back in first. It will price the two legs individually and add them into one. With booking at different times, the travel on your ticket has to end within a year from the date of ticket issue. That is, if you book say today for next May, then the travel on your ticket cannot last past June 1. If you do book a one-way and want to turn it into a round-trip later, you will have to pay a destination change fee of $150, unfortunately, also… unless you have elite status, in which case it is lower in some tiers.

  6. I hope you can help me out…I’m desperately trying to speculate for a future trip with United…and I’m having quite a time of it. I just can’t figure it out! I want to do 1 open jaw and 1 stopover, for 2 people. This should be 60,000 miles apiece, correct? Well, when I go to united and punch these in, (DSM–>Frankfurt, Germany (stopover)–>Budapest Linz, Austria–>DSM, I keep getting a total of something like 190,000 points, when it should only be 120,000. Do you know what I’m doing wrong? I even tried just calculating 2 1-ways, from DSM–>Frankfurt–>Budapest, and it gave me a total of 90,000 points. Still wrong, because I chose all Saver awards for economy. So frustrating. I’d love if you could offer some advice! =) Thank you in advance!!

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