Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I long for the days when I could get a $500 flight to europe over the winter. sigh. now that I have kids, I think it'll be another decade before I travel internationally.

I just got a $530 ticket to Europe!

Are you planning on coming back

I am depressed about this too. We talk about it constantly in my family, because DH and I are from different countries, and we have two kids. A trip to Europe for us is $6,000 just for airfare. Add in other costs, and it becomes a $10K trip just to see one family. This is one reason why now that I have 2 kids, we try to get people to come to us. The other reason is that I can not get excited about getting on a plane with two small kids

I give my parents money, but the two of them traveling to see us is still cheaper for me than the other way. My parents just visited from Europe, and we only paid about 530 Euro per ticket. They traveled on Christmas Eve and stayed almost a month for the airfare to work out so low. DH is about to take our toddler to see his grandfather for the first time. DD and I will be staying here since she is in school but also because we can't all afford to go. That is the other thing we do - we split up for vacations. Which brings me to the most depressing part - we never have real vacations as a family, since we spend our money visiting our home countries.

OP here. After seeing people talk about using credit cards to get miles, I checked out our main credit card, which is a hotel chain's card. I thought you could only use points for hotels, but when I looked into it more, I found that you can use points for tickets too with no blackout dates. I tried the England trip I'd hoped to go on this spring and was able to find tickets easily. Unfortunately, it doesn't help with the school/time off problem, but it's good to know that we can use our hotel credit card for tickets.

Wow... I have a 3 year old and baby, so we haven't gone abroad in a while, but we have a family reunion in switzerland coming up, so I just searched the fares.... if they stay the same this trip will just not happen. 6,000 just for airfare for everyone. Then if we're there for a week, add over 1000 for hotel, and then we have to pay for part of the reunion, and any additional touring we want to do...and when the reunion happens I will be not working and taking on grad school loans.

We can either put dh's bonus towards it, or in the kids' college savings like we usually do. :/

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We just used frequent flyer miles to purchase 4 tix to Italy this summer. We have a miles card and pretty much buy everything on it in order to get miles.

The thing about earning one to one miles for every dollar spent is that you have to buy a heck of a lot of stuff to earn 240,000 miles for 4 European tickets.

Actually, it's not really just one to one because there are double and triple points for various things or during certain times and you get a lot of miles for signing up for the card in the first place.

Travel to UK is cheapest among all Europe. The days of $400 tickets are over, sadly. Spouse is from UK & goes over for 1-2 week stays at least twice a year, to visit family; stays with family. . I stay home for most of these trips. We also manage another vacation for ourselves-usually US or Canada. We have one car, one salary, and live below our means (ie, smaller house vs. McMansion).

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We just used frequent flyer miles to purchase 4 tix to Italy this summer. We have a miles card and pretty much buy everything on it in order to get miles.

The thing about earning one to one miles for every dollar spent is that you have to buy a heck of a lot of stuff to earn 240,000 miles for 4 European tickets.

which airline has int'l FF tix available for 80k? I'm only finding 100k+.

United to London. We booked saver fares for 30k FF miles per leg for the 4 of us. Not many dates to pick from during the summer but we got it to work for a 12 day trip.

Thanks!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We just used frequent flyer miles to purchase 4 tix to Italy this summer. We have a miles card and pretty much buy everything on it in order to get miles.

The thing about earning one to one miles for every dollar spent is that you have to buy a heck of a lot of stuff to earn 240,000 miles for 4 European tickets.

which airline has int'l FF tix available for 80k? I'm only finding 100k+.

United to London. We booked saver fares for 30k FF miles per leg for the 4 of us. Not many dates to pick from during the summer but we got it to work for a 12 day trip.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We just used frequent flyer miles to purchase 4 tix to Italy this summer. We have a miles card and pretty much buy everything on it in order to get miles.

The thing about earning one to one miles for every dollar spent is that you have to buy a heck of a lot of stuff to earn 240,000 miles for 4 European tickets.

which airline has int'l FF tix available for 80k? I'm only finding 100k+.

This is one of the reasons why we both kept working after our kids were born (the main one being we liked our jobs and had good child care). We don't splurge in many areas of our life (except for private school), but love to travel. As our kids have gotten older and approach college age, we have great memories, and the kids agree that they prefer the trips to the latest "things". Now that they are older, we will do a big trip before each leaves home, like a safari or something. It has definitely gotten more expensive though.

When I was in graduate school, I managed to visit my parents every other year on a Teaching Assistantship of $800 per month. The air tickets were over $1k, plus I had to buy gifts for everybody. All the poor foreign students managed that, plus we traveled all over US.

I do not know what happened to me, now it seems so expensive to visit or travel. The funny thing is the tickets still cost about the same. Buying one vs four IS a big difference though.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We just used frequent flyer miles to purchase 4 tix to Italy this summer. We have a miles card and pretty much buy everything on it in order to get miles.

The thing about earning one to one miles for every dollar spent is that you have to buy a heck of a lot of stuff to earn 240,000 miles for 4 European tickets.

Sort of. You just have to game it a bit and look for specials where they offer double or triple miles for certain purchases. Also try to use it for everything from lunch to recurring payments like utility bills. It adds up.

I'm in a nasty funk because we've been planning for eight years to take a trip this summer to Europe and the plane tickets are more than we can afford even with crazy stopovers.

I've heard buying a few weeks before the trip is the cheapest but I'm afraid to wait and take the risk. Plus, then you can screwed on hotel deals!!!

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We just used frequent flyer miles to purchase 4 tix to Italy this summer. We have a miles card and pretty much buy everything on it in order to get miles.

The thing about earning one to one miles for every dollar spent is that you have to buy a heck of a lot of stuff to earn 240,000 miles for 4 European tickets.

Or fly a lot. I used to have frequent work trips that were almost always on the same airline, so I got a credit card to rack up more and the miles accumulated quickly. But now that I don't travel as much, it's pretty slow and takes us forever to accumulate.

Anonymous wrote:We just used frequent flyer miles to purchase 4 tix to Italy this summer. We have a miles card and pretty much buy everything on it in order to get miles.

The thing about earning one to one miles for every dollar spent is that you have to buy a heck of a lot of stuff to earn 240,000 miles for 4 European tickets.