What is the easiest way to amass miles to make more frequent trips to Asia possible ? Are people acquiring miles by flights only? Or is there some great credit card or other tricks? Thanks!

In general, you should BUY your economy class tickets to Asia and earn miles there to use for other uses (last-minute domestic, international business class, etc).

For example, we often pay $800 economy fares from Houston to Hong Kong. Even without bonus miles, we earn close to 20,000 miles for a roundtrip. Buy two such roundtrips a year, and you become an "elite" that give you 25% or 50% bonus miles and all the perks like dedicated security and check-in lines, better seats (and more legroom on UA), etc...

Miles gather much quickly this way. Most credit cards give you 1 mile per dollar spent. To get one economy roundtrip to Asia, you need to spend $50,000. And deal with limited award seat availability.

I vacation in Asia often and accumulate miles that way...through the miles to get there. Plus, I buy the plane ticket on AmExp which is a card connected to one of my frequent flyer programs...Delta which is connected to Singapore Air. I also have, for a couple of decades used my AmExp card like a checkbook. I don't carry around a checkbook at home. I use AmExp and then pay the bill monthly by phone and the dollars convert to frequent flyer miles. I've been issued a free ticket on Singapore Air for this August for L.A.-Singapore-Bangkok-Singapore-L.A...which normally would be very expensive since there are two countries on the ticket. Always try to use your frequent flyer miles for doing two countries at the same time. Choose a country as your one allowed stopover...depending on what airline you're on. Happy Travels!

I fly United, so I buy coach tickets to Asia and use my ff miles to upgrade to business. Thus, I earn miles for my flights. I do earn miles flying domestically (one trick is to always take the airline you earn miles with - if you pay a few dollars more or the connection isn't as good, remember you are earning miles). I also use a United credit card, so I get 1 mile for each dollar I spend. Because I'm a Premier Exec, I earn double miles for all of my trips; if you are a Premier, you earn a 25% premium on your miles. There are always promotions, ways to earn extra miles.

So start by choosing an airline you can use for all of your travel needs.

For the last few years United has had a double-EQM offer at the end of the year. Register and pay $200 and you will earn double elite qualifying miles for flights Oct 15 thru Dec 15.

You can get 5000 EQM by getting a platinum Mileage Plus Visa card (fee is a whopping $140 but free to Premier Exec 1Ks). You will also get 17,500 to 25,000 redeemable miles for signing up and using the card.

With that card, buy a ticket at united dot com to Thailand during the double-EQM period. A fare of $1000 will certainly qualify for the double-EQM, maybe a lower fare too. For purchasing online you get 1000 miles. For charging the ticket to the MP Visa, you get 2000 miles. You will also earn 1000 EQM for buying the ticket with your MP Visa.

Fly the 20,000 miles roundtrip from the US east coast to Bangkok.

20000 flight miles
20000 MP Visa signup bonus
2000 miles for buying the ticket w/MP Visa
1000 miles for online purchase
1000 for online check-in both ways
----
44000 redeemable miles

For EQMs it would be:
5000 MP Plat Visa signup
40000 double-EQM
1000 purchase ticket with MP Visa
----
46,000 EQM only 4000 EQM short of Premier Executive.

For $250 you can get a transcon flight to earn the 4000 you need.

You'd spend
$140
$1000
$200
$250
----
$1590 and earn about 50,000 miles and Premier Exec status for Jan 07 thru Feb 08.

Kathie, have you seen the upgradeable UA fares lately? I want to go to BKK in April but they want a whopping $1750. Yikes; might have to try a different carrier

MrW, you have the math for the miles!

Jim, I always call to get upgradeable fares. They are several hundred dollars higher this year than last. I recently purchased my tickets to Bangkok for November and paid $1500 (including tax and fees) the upgradeable roundtrip.

Some time spent reading through the messages in your airline forum over at flyertalk.com should be very helpful.

If you have 45,000 miles in the United Mileage Plus program you can get an award ticket between the USA and Beijing, Shanghai, or Hong Kong. This is for travel thru March 31. The regular coach award for North Asia is 60,000 miles.

I have a Citibank Debit Card that gives American Airlines miles for every dollar spent as long as I select "credit" (sign) rather than "debit(w/ a PIN). I also got a lot of bonus miles when I signed up for the card, so after a few months of usage I had enough to go to Belize last summer.

For my SEA trip, I'm useing Delta miles on an open jaw into Langkawi and them home from Siem Reap. My husband and I were a few thousand miles short last summer, when Delta offered 10,000 bonus miles to fly "Song" from LAX to NYC for $199 RT. Well, it was time to celebraty my husband's B-Day in NYC while accumulating the remaining miles we needed to get to Thailand