Complete noob upgrade question
 

In March I'm traveling from Ohio to Beijing and back through my school. The tickets are already booked and purchased. Flying Continental.

I'd like to fly first class for the obvious benefits, and a friend of mine is getting into the whole "travel hacking" thing and recommended I check out this site.

I'm not sure where to start, or if I could even make this happen so quickly. I don't even fly much right now, so I have no idea how upgrades work for frequent flyer programs or how many miles it would cost.

If anyone has some tips or time to point me in the right direction, it would be much appreciated!!

Do you have any miles with CO as of now?

Welcome to FT, DMBmelch!

Since you're flying Continental (CO), your best bet would to look at their program for upgrades. While it's possible to upgrade a CO flight using miles from other airlines, you would need to have booked a very expensive B or Y fare.

The cost of your upgrade on CO depends on the fare basis of your ticket. The mileage is the same for all fares - 30,000 (unless you have a Y fare where it's only 15,000) - but there is a co-pay that depends on the fare. The co-pays are
If you decide you want to try for the upgrade, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to accumulate the miles you need as quickly as possible.

After first being sure to find out what fare class you are flying. Don't be confused; sometimes Y is used as shorthand for ALL coach tickets, but given that you are booked through your school, I highly doubt you are flying Y. Probably one of the classes lower on the list but it's also possible that you are booked in a class that isn't on the list (if it's a group fare or something...).

The "hack" to getting upgrades is to have a lot of miles per year on a particular airline. That is, there's not really a secret that lets you get first class upgrades by the right magic incantation or code.

Be realistic; simply use this long flight as a way to start earning miles and start building status on one particular airline.

Thanks for the info. Part of my confusion was all this B,M,H,Q....class tickets stuff. No idea what my ticket is. I might call them and see if I can find out how much it is to upgrade to first class. My thought was that if I needed x miles to upgrade, I could find a credit card/checking account to sign up for that would get me those miles for free.