In the present work, we study the OZI-allowed three body open flavor decay properties of higher vector charmonium and bottomonium states with an extended quark pair creation model. For the bottomonium system, we get that (i) the $BBpi$ and $B^*B^*pi$ partial decay widths of the $Upsilon(5S)$ state are consistent with the experiment, and the $BB^*pi$ partial decay width of the $Upsilon(5S)$ state is smaller but very close to the Belles experiment. Meanwhile, (ii) the $BB^*pi$ and $B^*B^*pi$ decay widths of $Upsilon(11020)$ can reachs $2sim3$ MeV. In addition, (iii) for the most of higher vector charmonium states, the partial decay widths of the $DD^*pi$ and $D^*D^*pi$ modes can reach up to several MeV, which may be observed in future experiments.