The Island Hopper with Miles

“The Pacific Islands”- some of the most dreamed about destinations in the world and it’s even more awesome actually being there. But it’s even better for frequent flyer junkies who have United miles. Perhaps you’re already familiar with United’s policy with stopovers, or you’ve read my series on Creating Your Dream Trip With United Stopovers, which talks about the rules and how to book stopovers with United. But these rules are incredibly generous when you consider 1) that the Pacific is huge; 2) that’s it’s all one zone on united; and 3) it’s only 25,000 miles for a roundtrip within that zone (or 40,000 for business). It’s a steal.

So I’ve decided to do a series explaining how to see more of the pacific with less… particularly with United miles.

• The Island Hopper with Miles
• The Island Hopper with Cash
• The Pacific Hopper with Miles
• Our Photos from these Pacific Islands

So right now I want to share with you an opportunity to see a whole lot of islands in a short amount of time with the island hopper. Let me explain the “island hopper.” United actually has a flight that services all of these islands on just one route. Although I’ll admit two things. First, the stop is 40 minutes total. You would get no time to visit on each island. You’d get to look out your window and run outside and come back and catch the flight to the next island. And also, Guam is not as cool as Yap. So if you’re there consider making the trip to see real primitive culture and great diving.

Still, the flight to Guam is from Hawaii, and as I said, you get one stopover. So you could stopover in Hawaii and make Guam your destination. If you do this, you could see all the little islands on the way to Guam. All this for 70,000 miles.

Finding the flight is actually really simple as United’s flights to Guam are through Hawaii, and just check which days they fly from Hawaii to Guam via Micronesia. You can do that by just searching on United.com from HNL to MAJ (click “Award”). And creating a stopover is normally very easy, but recently I have not been able to get any stopover to/from Guam to work! I don’t know why, but my instinct is that they are trying to crack down on people taking advantage of the Pacific to Pacific pricing – like I did and talked about in this post.

So I would normally book in the multi-destination search like this:

And that still works fine for most routes – like creating stopovers in Europe on the way to Asia. However, it’s not working here. If anyone has an opinion on why I can’t get this to book online – please share! This is frustrating to me. However, you can still piece it together yourself and call it in.

Some advice about calling it in… no offense to the agents, but they don’t know the rules. You get a stopover and two open-jaws (which again, I explain here). So just get them to try your route. I don’t think it’s a problem with this route, as it is simpler… but if at first you don’t succeed, call again. You can hold tickets for 3 days! Meaning, no payment needed for 3 days. Put it on hold if you want (although if you have the last two tickets on hold you won’t be able to try again). Seriously, too many people hear the agent say “I don’t think you can create a stopover in Hawaii” and they just go okay and book a different trip to not be confrontational.