I was sitting at work and taking a break when I decided to open up TweetDeck to see what was happening.

Just then a tweet by Gary Leff from View From the Wing came through.

A thought entered my mind – perhaps I should take the entire family to Hawaii? My kids haven’t been outside the continental US yet and they’ve always wanted to go.

My next thought was – there wouldn’t be five seats on the same flights and certainly not at the saver award level.

I opened up united.com and started to do some searches for six weeks in the future to Maui. To my surprise, there were plenty of seats available and all at the saver award level for almost all dates throughout the summer.

I reread the promotion and the sale was 10,000 United miles off each ticket booked on May 6 only good for travel from June 1 – November 18th.

I called my wife and asked her what she thought about taking everyone to Hawaii. I’m much more of a spontaneous person than my wife and it was a lot of information all at once. After thinking about it for a while and looking at our frequent flier accounts, she agreed and we decided to book it. I had enough miles to book 3 tickets on my account and she had enough to book 2 tickets on her account.

Total miles used per ticket was 35,000 for a total 175,000 United miles – a savings of 50,000 miles.

That night we sat our kids down and told them that we were taking a family vacation to Maui. It took about ten minutes of conversation to convince them that we weren’t joking and I haven’t seen my kids this excited in a long time. They started jumping up and down chanting “We’re going to Maui! We’re going to Maui!”