So I was in remote El Chalten, Argentina and with the slow and sketchy internet available in that town, I manage to read an email telling me that my Punta Arenas to Santiago flight in 4 days has been moved from 3:30 pm to 3:30 am.! In normal circumstances, this would be a terrible last-minute schedule change (3:30 in the morning, really?), but it was even more problematic for me as I was taking that flight to connect to an int'l flight that evening in Santiago. I obviously would miss my int'l connection if I waited for the delayed flight.

As frequent LATAM flyers know, LATAM's customer service isn't usually very efficient or user friendly (to say the least). Phone service in El Chalten is sketchy to start with (and I didn't have an Argentine SIM card for my phone), so I dreaded the possibility of trying to solve this problem with a LATAM phone agent given my poor Spanish and the agent's likely poor English. So I did a little research on my slow internet, and sent an email to a family member in the USA (who is an experienced traveller) asking them to call LATAM from the USA and rebook me on an earlier, still-scheduled flight that would get me from PUQ to SCL in time for my int'l connection.

It did take a couple phone calls and an almost hour long phone conversation with a LATAM call center supervisor (that apparently included all the typical LATAM confusion), but my family member was able to rebook us. Although we wound up with an almost 8 hour layover in SCL, it was better than any other alternative I had.

This is the first time LATAM -- or really any airline -- has done this to me with a random,terrible "rescheduling" a few days before a flight. It seemed quite bizarre to me -- although LATAM does regularly fly a lot of Punta Arenas-SCL flights in the middle of the night (why -- it would be like flying MIA-NYC at 3 am!). I did have a conversation with a tour operator in Punta Arenas who told me he had clients who LATAM had recently done the same thing to. So maybe their schedule isn't as reliable as I thought it was. It will certainly be something I consider the next time I book LATAM, especially if I am using the flight to connect to another one. Honestly, I thought their schedule was pretty reliable.