Originally Posted by
watiner
I'm hoping to travel to Tokyo and Beijing this summer (in the same trip) for about a month's time.
Cool. I will warn you that late Summer in Tokyo is very hot and humid. Very.
Someone mentioned that they flew to Japan for a couple hundred dollars by being "flexible"? How does this work? Also, If I chose to go the credit card route, what would be the best choice? Which frequent flier program would be best for traveling to and from the SFO airport?
That would be me. What I meant was that if you are flexible in when you go and where you go, then there are a lot more options for you. In the case my flight to Osaka, I went from just putzing around on FT to going to Japan with my friend
in less than an hour. I had to leave on weird days (Tues/Wed) to get the deal and I didn't have much choice in when I could go, but there I was with tickets! It was a fluke of luck, but I had to have the flexibility to book right then.
In my more recent travel experiences with my girlfriend, things have not been as flexible due to her work schedule, and that means that the price goes up. If you HAVE to leave on Thursday night and HAVE to be back by Monday, you will pay more.
Another way that flexibility pays is when something goes wrong: If the flight is full and they ask for volunteers, you are ready to step in and get paid for your delay. There are people who MUST be on that plane. If you are willing to get where you are going whenever you get there, you'll earn free travel.
I currently use the San Francisco (SFO) airport or the Oakland airport at home. At school, I live in Santa Barbara, so my closest large airport is LAX (the small one near my school costs 5x the amount of using LA's).
SFO and LAX are major hubs, which means you've got options. People may disagree, but United might be a good option to look at for earning miles although recent changes have made it less than it used to be. Alaska Air is also a very interesting carrier in my opinion, with a good mix of OneWorld and SkyTeam carriers. If you don't know about airline alliances, check out these sites:
oneworld.com
skyteam.com
staralliance.com
The basic idea is that you pick one carrier to focus on. You earn miles when you fly on partner airlines which accumulates in a single account and gets you to award travel faster. i.e. 50,000 in one airline account vs. 15,000 in five different airline accounts (75,000 total). In the first case, you have a round trip ticket. In the second case, you have more miles total, but they aren't usable because they are spread across different accounts.
I don't have a credit card, but I've been looking into getting one. My parents are willing to use it for me to build my credit score (they're very good at making payments on time).
Lucky you!
Traveling is mostly difficult for me because of airfare prices. Typical tickets out of the country cost in the thousands (without using any of the strategies of pro fliers). I don't find figuring out cheap food, places to stay, etc., but the plane ticket is one thing that continues to baffle me.
$1000 tops is what you should expect to pay for an opportunistic ticket (where you don't NEED to fly, but would like to). Looking at SFO or LAX for international tickets in end of April, $862 to Beijing, $1,227 for SFO-NRT/NRT-PEK/PEK-SFO ($900 + $337 for NRT-PEK<-- You can *probably* get this one-way cheaper...), $783 LAX-NRT, $879 to SIN, $851 to MAD, $762 + $68 for SFO-LHR/LHR-MAD/MAD-SFO. This is the type of stuff you should be looking at and these are all live prices right now (although none of these are particularly fantastic. They're good, but better can be done).
Look here: matrix.itasoftware.com and use the search by month feature.
