Getting to Seoul

All right first things first.

Probably one of the first things any of you college students planning to study abroad in Seoul need to consider is finding how to get there. Now, considering the distances involved, your travel options are  pretty much restricted to flying to Incheon International Airport and it is here where you need to take several factors into consideration.

Probably one of the main things you, being a student, will consider is the price for the ticket to Korea.  I found tickets to Seoul tend to be cheaper if you book a round trip ticket well ahead of time with booking sites like Skyscanner. However, if like me, mid-way through your semester abroad you decide that you want to travel to any of the other countries a stone's throw away from Korea, like Japan and China, at the end of the semester, you may need to change the flight dates. In this situation you can run into problems like ticket change fees, paying really high fare differences and, if you booked from a site like Kayak or Expedia. it can be hard to get adequate customer service. In light of this, I would recommend two main courses of action.

The first is to only buy the ticket there and later buy the return ticket separately. However, be advised that the return flight alone may be significantly more expensive than a round-trip booking. In my case, a return flight, alone, was almost twice as much as what I had paid for a round-trip booking.

The second option and, what I chose to do, is to use sites like Skyscanner to find the available flights and, then using that information, book directly with the airline. Granted, the price will probably be a tad more expensive than the booking sites' prices, but it will give you, and the airline, more flexibility. Personally, I booked with Asiana Airlines who were glad to change the date of my return flight at no additional charge, although I cannot guarantee this will always happen.

Another factor that you want to consider is to decide which airline to book with. Me personally, I would recommend Asiana Airlines due to the fact that I found their in flight service to be good with the flight staff being very courteous, their offering of Korean meals like bibimbap to be awesome, and the fact that their seats offer quite a bit of leg room. The leg room bit is important because, on a 10 hour plus flight to Korea, having enough room to stretch your legs is just bliss. Also, their customer service is excellent, and as noted above, they may even change your flights at no extra cost.

In the interest of full disclosure I do want to point out that I am an infrequent traveler, so there are probably many more tips and tricks to saving money on travel bookings I may not be aware of. If you wish to find out more you may want to try Travel Hacks by clicking this link Click Here!. However, I do want to mention that I can make no assurances regarding results obtained with this product.

On a final note, if the price of the flight to Seoul is your main concern, and you know for a fact that your flight dates will not change, booking with a booking site will probably be your best bet.