Back from the 500 000 miles run. Everything went very smoothly. All flights on time (in fact mostly 5 to 10 minutes early), smooth transfers, except the dreaded Bogota, of course. Generally a very positive impression and no doubt that I will be considering using Latinpass airlines that I would have had serious doubts considering before. Most has already been said by others. Just a few additional points:
1) Bogota connections: it seems possible to avoid at least part of the transfer routine if you connect from one Avianca flight to another: on deplaning from MIA, an Avianca representative was there to intercept connecting passengers just before immigration. I do not know whether this enables you to bypass all controls or just the immigration/emigration controls but not the security controls.
2) if you connect from GUA-MGA on Copa to a Grupo Taca flight from MGA, you can definitely get your boarding pass in GUA. If you are flying business class and intend to use the lounge at GUA, you might as well get your Taca boarding pass first, as the Copa agent at GUA will personally take you to the lounge once you have checked in with them. At MGA, you CAN avoid immigration if you have your onward boarding pass: just mention to an airport agent at the end of the airbridge that you have a connection and show your boarding pass, and they will take you directly to the gate via the backway (my total transfer time from the plane to the gate for my next flight must have been no more than 2 minutes). You do need to have an agent to take you through, though, as the route is not normally authorised for passengers. The odds are that the agent might not speak English but the word in Spanish for connection is virtually the same ("connexion", with the stress on the last syllable) so it should not be too difficult to make yourself understood
3) if you dread the perspective of waiting in smoke-filled airports, you'll be pleasantly surprised. I don't recall seeing anybody smoke anywhere, even in designated smoking areas at airports.
4) Radisson GUA: There are hotel representatives in the terminal on the right hand side just before the exit. Ours (Radisson) was not there and the shuttle was not there either even though Tomphot had called Radisson in advance. Nevertheless, when called (by the Marriott representative in the terminal on our behalf), they told us to get a taxi and they paid for the taxi on arrival at the hotel.
5) Departure tax at GUA is USD20. According to the Copa check-in agent at GUA, it IS possible to avoid payment of the tax if you arrive in the evening and leave the next morning. However, there must be some kind of special stamp by the immigration officer on your passport when you enter GUA rather than the normal immigration stamp. Neither Tomphot, his friend nor myself managed to avoid paying the departure tax, though. Future flyers might try to draw the immigration officer's attention to the fact that you are only provisionally transiting in Guatemala and see whether this produces any result.
6) You get nice views of volcanoes on the GUA-MGA flight: a few minutes after take off from GUA (on the right-hand side of the plane) and later, some 15 to 20 minutes before reaching Managua.
7) This one is for non-US nationals on the Visa-Waiver programme: make sure that the check-in agent collects the departure section of the green form when you leave the US: while airlines do it routinely on transatlantic flights, Latin American airlines might not necessarily do so as none of the Latin American nationalities (apart from Venezuela, I think) qualify for visa waiver, so airlines are less used to it. Avianca did not collect mine, as I realised too late. As it happened, I had no problem re-entering the US as the immigration officer at MIA was pretty relaxed, but INS agents can sometimes be inflexible. Also, pick-up a new green Visa Waiver form from the check-in agent for your US-bound flight, in case they don't have any on board the plane.
The icing on the cake for this trip was a voluntary bumping-off on a Northwest segment for my return trip to Europe, which resulted in my arriving home at the same time as originally planned and yet getting sufficient compensation from NW to get the cost of my (admittedly cheap) transatlantic flight back
I'll probably be doing the remaining four segments for the million sometimes in May/June and spend some time in Quito but I will wait to see first how the posting to my LP account for this trip goes.
[This message has been edited by NickB (edited 04-03-2000).]