This is my experience for attempting to book with LATAM PASS kilometers the following route: NYC-BUE-SAO/RIO-NYC. Latam website and systems are so poor, anything beyond a plain vanilla award return ticket needs to be booked over the phone. Here are the LATAM PASS T&Cs:
latam.com/en_us/latam-pass/about-the-program/terms-and-conditions. It requires all award tickets to be round trips, allows open jaws within the same reward zone, and allows for one stop over. So I figured it should work. I checked for availability online, and figured I should be able to book the following: leg1 JFK-SCL-EZE / leg2 AEP-GRU / leg3 GIG/JFK. Several days and six hours on the phone later, I am yet to succeed in booking the itinerary. This is the log:
Call #1: 55min long. Call drops (problem on their end, not mine, connection was horrible, clearly on their side, I am calling from Manhattan from an AT&T cell phone) after having been transferred 3 times (spoke to 4 agents). I do not get a call back even though I had been asked for a callback number in case of disconnection.
Call #2 : 17min long. Call drops and no call back.
Call #3 : 10min long. Call drops and no call back.
Call #4: 48min long. Customer center: "
multi leg trips can only be booked via a specialized department, and they will call you back within 72 hours to book the ticket". That meant 72 hours of fare uncertainty, as no reservation could be made and no fare guaranteed. I say forget it.
Call #5: 33min long. Customer center: "multi leg trips can only be booked via a specialized department, and they will call you back within 72 hours to book the ticket". I had hoped I would be able to avoid this 72 hours delay, but being told the same thing twice in a row, I say OK, please have them call me back.
Email #1: LATAM emails at 3AM two+ days later, saying that they could not call back as too late in the day, provides case number, and asks me to call back.
Call #6: 70min long. I call, enter case number, and that directs me to a "special" department (not customer service). We go over itinerary and I am given a fare estimate. I need additional kilometers. I plan to get the kilometers transferred from my wife's account (cheaper than buying them), which takes 24 hours, so I need to call them back once I have the kilometers transferred.
Call #7: 31min long. I call after the kilometers transfer is complete, enter case number, and after going through the itinerary, I am told the system requires the itinerary to be booked as 2 separate reservations: NYC-BUE-NYC & BUE-SAO/RIO-NYC-BUE, forfeiting the return tickets on each, effectively doubling the price of the itinerary. If true, they could have said so sooner, before I made the transfer. I say I need to call back (hoping this information is wrong). The representative wants to close my case as solved, and I ask to please keep the case number open, so as to avoid having to go through the additional step of calling customer service and waiting up to 72 hours for a call back. She says OK.
Call #8: 12min long. Back to regular customer service because my prior case number got closed. Call drops and no call back, even though as usual I had provided a number for a callback in case of disconnection.
Call #9: 8min long. Call drops and no call back.
Call #10: 21min long. I change the itinerary to NYC-BUE-RIO-NYC, or more specifically to JFK-SCL-EZE / EZE-GIG / GIG-JFK, thinking that the agent may be able to book the flight without SAO in the middle. Customer service agent tells me itinerary can't be booked because
stop overs can only be made in the same zone as either the departure or destination cities. This would make sense, and would explain the difficulties, although it is not stated anywhere on the LATAM PASS terms and conditions, no other agent had mentioned this before, and one agent was ready to book the ticket before but I was missing kilometers. I say I need to call back.
Call #11: 50min long.
Customer service agent says no problem, but I need additional kilometers because price went up.
Note this time I was not told I would need to be called back by a different department. I asked the agent if she could make a reservation to put it on hold for 24 hours. She said no several times in different ways, but from speaking to a prior agent I had understood a reservation could indeed be made, so I insisted, she looked into it, and told me that OK, that she can make the reservation, but as 3 separate reservations rather than 1, and that when I call back I would need to get it as 1. I said OK. While she was doing so, of course, connection dropped. I later got the emails for 2 of the 3 reservations. Interestingly, the reservations were made as two round trips (e.g. NYC-EZE-NYC, etc), and the email says reservation valid until 13:30 Santiago Chile time of the day after (so valid for 22:30 hours). Corollary:
if any agent ever says an award ticket cannot be placed on hold, do not take no for an answer, and insist.
So here I am. I just had the missing kilometers transferred, and I am hoping that when I call tomorrow I'll be able to book the bloody ticket. I honestly doubt I will.
Should note that LATAM agents usually pick up the phone immediately, with no wait time, at least these days ... which is great, yet shows how bad the above phone calls are, as those stated minutes are mostly spent with an agent on the line, repeating the same itinerary over and over again. Also, when providing the itinerary, I would provide specific flights with flight number to make things faster.
The purpose of this post is simply to document the events and provide guidance for other travelers looking into LATAM award travel with a stop over - I could not find any other posts/threads/articles discussing the experience.