Planning/Not Planning

Planning for a 10.5 week trip is hard... Out of flights, hotel, activities, restaurants, packing... I've done exactly 1. Flights.  And not all flights. Just my 1st couple. So, make that a 1/2.

For my transatlantic flights, I choose Continental/United.  Why you ask?
Very long explanation to why below:
Because it came out to be the cheapest in terms of overall cost.  My search consisted of kayak.com and continental.com and some other carriers based out of Asia.  It was $1,320 round trip.  Kind-of high but this was because I waited so long to book and that I had a very particular flight schedule, fly out of the NY/NJ into BKK (Bangkok, Thailand) and fly back to RDU from SEL (Seoul, Korea).  Considering round trip tickets are cheaper over 2 1-way tickets, it kinda locked me into a few carriers.  That, and the fact that I'm going to get 17,788 miles frequent flier miles * 1.25 (a little bonus since I FINALLY made elite for Continental this year - side story: I missed it by 500 miles for 3 years running.)  Since, I normally flight Continental anyway, I deducted the value of the miles ($444.70 = 22,235 miles * $0.02) from the cost of the ticket. This equals a way low price compared to flying other airlines for me.  Another bonus, as an elite member, I get to pick better seats (more legroom) on United Flights.  Continental charges for picking better seats (bastards) so I used seatguru.com to pick the optimal seat given my choices.

Website I use to find the best seats:
www.seatguru.com

For the inter-asia flights, we (4 guys doing the exchange to Hong Kong) researched using kayak.com.  Here is how we saved about 25%.  We tried to do a multi-city booking for BKK (Bangkok,Thailand) -> HKT (Phuket, Thailand)-> SGN (Ho Chi Min City, Vietnam) -> HKG (Hong Kong, China) and it came to $800.  This was kind-of high so we tried doing 3 one way tickets.  It came out to be the same exact flights and price (DUH).  After looking through the itinerary some more, we saw that most of the flights went through BKK.  So, we booked 2 round trip flights to HKT and SGN ($115 & $250) and 1 one way flight to HKG ($170) all from BKK and it came out to $535.  That saved us a little over $200 by adding one extra leg between SGN and SGN.

What we booked:

One thing that may screw us is if a flight gets delayed.  We left ~3hrs between flights so we should be ok.  The fact that our flights are all direct should help us as well.  I'll let you know how this all turns out.

After writing this, I can see why I have only booked flights so far.  I think too damn much. =)