Originally Posted by
OpenSky
2) Ground Staff were outright surly - and poorly trained.
The old staff are gone - some of the people working the check in "preferential" are rew and don't know how to use Sabre facing LATAM portal except for the most of vanilla of requests. Same lining - i.e checking in bags from Latam Brasil to Latam Brasil on two seperate tickets were denied, the same for Latam Peru. They only know how to do the most vanilla of things.
To be fair LATAM for quite some time had the policy of not allowing to checks bag through with different tickets operated by LATAM and they only had to honor this for Oneworld connections since it was a requirement for the alliance. Since LATAM is not part of Oneworld since 2020, I am not surprised they don't cover this topic anymore for new agents.
Originally Posted by
OpenSky
Simple things like attaching priority tags - they forgot.
But yes, I am surprised they are letting junior agents operate the priority counters. This almost happened to me in SCL, also the agent didn't seem to have a lot of experience with pax entering the US with a Visa (and without an ESTA)
Originally Posted by
OpenSky
4) Most annoying : I also noticed that thoughout the system there was this obcession to board early, 1 hour before departure, and in most cases the plane also left early! The ground staff annoyed me to no end - I took it upon myself to show up to the gate as as late as possible ( on purpose in spite ) - in all cases, I got lectured ! - they then scrambled as soon as they realized I was a premium passenger - not sure why? I did have things to do in the lounge - and most planes do not have wifi, so boarding late was out of necessity, and calls to make and messages to reply.
I am afraid they are hard pressed to meet their KPI of 0 minutes delay. Even at the expense of the traveler's time
Originally Posted by
behuman
anyone experience with the new "premium" check in area in SCL and the lounge ?
In the priority check-in lanes there was quite a mess with a big queue. I believe the extra documentation (like vaccine records) delayed the check-in process significantly, luckily I verified my documentation in advance and I was able to skip the line. You can do this via WhatsApp up to 6 hours before departure
https://www.latamairlines.com/us/en/...p/ready-to-fly
The lounge had a beautiful design. There is a separate section for Business & Top Tier; Platinum flying on Economy; and another for the Santander alliance. I was only able to enter the latter and it was quite decent, I had a salmon salad and a Haggen Dazs ice cream while I was able to wirelessly charge my phone on the table. Sadly they don't have an alcohol license yet.
The food offering for the other two should be better.