i'm no expert (there are many here, including some of the responses above), but i am also a college student. if you were to apply for cards yourself, i would suggest the cards that require a single purchase (ie the southwest card or us airways card) over trying to spend $5k, which most college students don't even spend in a year on a credit card. if your parents allow you to use their credit or assist in meeting spending requirements, then you can go for things like the 50k chase shappire or 50k amex gold biz and their higher spending requirements. but the single best way i've found to accumulate a lot of miles fast (and this is for me, others will advise different) is the purchasing / reselling during promotions (like the delta skymall 25k for $500 spend or the 36 avios / dollar at nordstroms). for about $1800 final cost, i got 375k delta skymiles and 75k miles from meeting my spending on an amex gold biz. considering i could transfer those 75k to delta during a promotion for more than 1:1, it is roughly 500k miles for under $2000. using 100k of those miles just yesterday, i was able to book a biz class roundtrip from chicago to amsterdam that was $3200. it costs me about $600. flying economy would have been roughly $400. so using the single purchase credit cards and then meeting minimum spending by going in big during purchase promotions seems to work the best for me.

Thank you everyone for being so generous in your responses! A couple points of clarification on my specific situation:

I have traveled to China and Canada before, but with parents, and as a child.

I'm hoping to travel to Tokyo and Beijing this summer (in the same trip) for about a month's time.

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).

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).

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.


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?

Thanks again everyone!

Simple - US Air will get you a US-Asia ticket for 60,000 in economy with one stopover allowed. You can fly SFO-NRT-PEK-SFO for 60k quite easily, as long as their is award ticket AVAILABILITY. US miles give you access to every airline in the Star Alliance, which you can do some research on and find potential routes.

Also simple - Getting the 60,000 miles. First the the US CC. That will get you an easy 40,000 miles. Then do a bit of research, sign up for netflix, other stuff to get to 60k, buy some miles, maybe even take a mileage run

NOT SIMPLE - Finding award ticket availability for the dates you want. You will have an almost impossible time piecing together a complex itinerary if you don't know what you are doing. You can't just look on US' website and find availability - there is some skill required in the process. Some people have invented 'award ticket booking services' for this specific purpose. If you aren't too flexible with your dates, it will be impossible for you, but since you have a nice 3-month summer holiday, it should be entirely possible.

You should, in addition to posting here, do some research on how to find award ticket availability, as this is the most difficult part of redeeming an award ticket. I can help find it, but I'll need dates, so come back to me when you have those 60,000 miles.

The guy who flew to Japan for $430 took advantage of one of the mistake fares that often get posted on FT. They often last for a few hours or a day or two and are usually due to mistakes in airlines' pricing systems.....don't plan your trip around them, because they probably won't happen, especially not for a specific destination.

ChinaAir can sometimes hit Beijing cheap from SFO. But it is a pay-to-fly deal.

Last trip over to China/Japan I used BA miles (now Avios) but there were fuel charges.

Summer flights often higher in price/points - that is where flexibility comes in.

There is a shuttle to LAX from Santa Barbara as I recall. LAX can be better than SFO sometimes as SFO can have fog delays and there can be sales.

Do pull a credit Karma score.

Then Kayak to Narita or Haneda from SFO, and Beijing from SFO in your time frame. Observe the lowest fares. Then go to the websites of the airlines and see what it would cost in points.

Some Vancouver, Canada flights to China can be bargains....

Cool. I will warn you that late Summer in Tokyo is very hot and humid. Very.

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.

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.

Lucky you!

$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.

I will second what an earlier poster said about prioritizing travel. Find something in your budget that you don't have to have and decide if traveling is more important, if it is cut it out and save that towards a trip. For me, it was the weekly night out bar hopping. My reasoning was that after skipping a couple of months doing the same old thing on Friday nights, I'd be able to bar hop somewhere new that most/all of my buddies had never been before