Ah great. The computer just ate my reply. How appropriate.

I am in the LAN lounge at SCL, while I should have been in the air flying to GRU. After the fulsome praise I lavished on LAN earlier, I guess I am being brought back to reality now. The flight to GRU will be leaving five hours late, meaning I'd miss my connection to the AA flight to JFK. As I am on an AONE4 ticket I wanted to fly F up north, even if it meant flying AA (and besides, I've never flown AA F before).

I hit the great LAN Wall of Inflexibility, with only two options being offered: either take the delayed flight today and fly to JFK tomorrow evening, or be rebooked on the SCL-LIM-JFK flight tonight. My various and insistent entreaties to be FIM'ed/endorsed over to either the TAM or Gol flights to GRU were met with a KLM-like "That Is Not Possible."

In the end I opted to go on the SCL-LIM-JFK flight tonight as it was more important to get to NY tomorrow than to get the extra miles from the SCL-GRU-JFK routing. It's galling nonetheless and will set me back in attaining EXP. I'll still make it, but I wanted both the miles and the experience of flying F on AA, even if it was only coffins.

I suppose the bright side is that the overall service on LA J may be better than AA F, but I would have liked to find out myself. Ah well. Just leaves a bit of a bitter taste after such a good start.