sbrower: The award was as stated:
One year of Free First Class Travel anywhere within the 50 United States.

It was never tied in with what class of service you flew the qualifying flights on. I think the feeling at the time was that if you could fly to all 50 states within the 50 day qualifying period, that was quite a feat in itself!

As for spending, I never heard that UA had predicted a minimum. I do know that I had the least expensive fare of anyone who qualified - $2979.00 plus or minus a few cents. At our awards banquet, John Zeeman, the Man at Mileage Plus at the time, claimed that the average cost in airfares for the qualifiers was about $8500.00 per person.

I saved money by buying a month long bus pass for $340.00 and saved thousands of dollars by utilizing short interstate flights and taking busses between those cities.

For example, in knocking off the southern states of TX, AR, TN, GA, AL, MS & LA I flew from DEN to DFW, bussed to Little Rock, then flew LIT-MEM, bussed to Atlanta, flew ATL-HSV, bussed from Huntsville to Memphis, then flew MEM-JAN, bussed to New Orleans and finally flew MSY-DEN. Had I not bought the fixed price bus pass, I would have had to fly back and forth through the hub cities of Chicago or Denver at considerably greater cost.

I also utilized routings and connections to my advantage. For example, I bought a roundtrip ticket between New York and Honolulu. As most of you know, you can connect along the applicable routing so long as it's four hours or less, i.e. a connection, not a stopover. My routing looked like this:

Outbound:..EWR-CLE-MKE-DEN-LAS-SFO-HNL
Return:....HNL-SEA-PDX-DEN-OMA-ABE-LGA

One price, twelve states. Such a deal!

clacko: United offered all 68 of us who qualified 100000 miles in credit to our accounts provided that we flew at least 100000 miles over the duration of the pass

Thus, if you flew 98,000 miles, you wouldn't get even one mile of credit to your account.