Other North & South America Frequent Flyer Programs - TAM's IT system

Took a GIG - GRU - MIA flight on TAM this week.

The GIG - GRU segment was flown on an A320 and the GRU - MIA on an A330.

Upon purchasing the ticket, I tried to get my seats. Website displays the A320 seat map, but not the A330. All it offered me is a message: "Change of Equipment".

Calling TAM's support center, they assigned the seats for me. It took ±20min while talking to the attendant for him to do it. Asking what happened, was told that the same flaw exists on their system (was not an web-only problem) and they had to do it manually, so the long time it has taken.

It appears that their system does not handles different aircrafts on different segments of a same flight number, unbelievable as it is.

Upon boarding, there was another passanger assigned to the same seat as I was. People on board treated it as an everyday matter, not even a raised eyebrow. The other passenger never argumented, saying something to the tone of "Oh!, it is TAM system again". He probably flies TAM more than I do.

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Very courteous people at TAM (all of them, not even one bad experience with their employees). But as a corporation, it sucks . . .

I've had pretty much the same issue with US before (different equipment, same flight number) so it's far from exclusive to TAM..

The "TAM System" or Amadeus is not well implemented. Normally a airline expend 18 to 24 months changing from their current system to Amadeus. TAM do it in 12 months ;).

If you fly TAM Airlines (old TAM Mercosul or TAM Paraguay), you couldn't assign a seat seat in economy class and have to call their "slow-dowm" customer service to assign in business. :mad:

As LAN is moving from Amadeus to SABRE in mid 2013, prediction is TAM will also move to SABRE one day...

I haven't flown LAN yet, but hope they be able to put more professionalism into TAM ground and backoffice operations.

On the air, TAM is usually fine, but before (check-in, reservations, irrops) they are needlessly stressful for the passenger.

As LAN is moving from Amadeus to SABRE in mid 2013, prediction is TAM will also move to SABRE one day...

"Rollback" to SABRE, because TAM creates a reservation system based on SABRE a long time ago.

TAM back-office it's very complicated.

Took a GIG - GRU - MIA flight on TAM this week.

The GIG - GRU segment was flown on an A320 and the GRU - MIA on an A330.

Upon purchasing the ticket, I tried to get my seats. Website displays the A320 seat map, but not the A330. All it offered me is a message: "Change of Equipment".

Calling TAM's support center, they assigned the seats for me. It took ±20min while talking to the attendant for him to do it. Asking what happened, was told that the same flaw exists on their system (was not an web-only problem) and they had to do it manually, so the long time it has taken.

It appears that their system does not handles different aircrafts on different segments of a same flight number, unbelievable as it is.

Upon boarding, there was another passanger assigned to the same seat as I was. People on board treated it as an everyday matter, not even a raised eyebrow. The other passenger never argumented, saying something to the tone of "Oh!, it is TAM system again". He probably flies TAM more than I do.

- - -

Very courteous people at TAM (all of them, not even one bad experience with their employees). But as a corporation, it sucks . . .

Just had the same problem with UA, even worse the first agent I called into to get seats assigned said it wasn't possible, and I had to wait to check-in, hung up called back, had them split the 2 segment same flight number, and Voila was able to select seats.