Bariloche, Argentina - On Miles/Points?
 

I am looking to get to Bariloche near the end of the year from Buenos Aires. These flights are quite expensive in my opinion, and I was wondering if there were any good options with miles to get down there.

I have United, UR, MR, AA and Delta miles to burn.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

You can fly LAN using your AA miles or Aerolineas using your Delta miles. I've no idea which offers the best deal though.

AA miles to fly BA or IB if you are in Europe....... where are you coming from...?

LAN Argentina will cost you 12K AA miles for a R/T + USD25 (booking fee), you have to call the agent and check day by day since BA and QF will not show any LA/4M flights (for some reason, it does not work anymore).

For AR (Aerolineas Argentinas), it will cost you 20K Skymiles for a R/T but there is 4 seats available on each flight. Use http://www.wandr.me to find your seats and then call Delta, they will waive the fee (tell them that you can not do it online).

Have a great trip!

Any idea what booking code is needed in each case? I'm curious whether it would be possible to narrow down availability before calling by looking on ExpertFlyer, or if it's not even possible to know without phoning up.

If you check for awards using the LAN site return Y awards cost 28,000kms. If you see them there then BA/AA should (famous last words) see them as well.

From what I've seen there is always good availability on the route.

Thanks HIDDY - now that you mention it, you explained that to me before once.

But I must be getting a bit senile as I completely forgot about it. :)

LAN have different award levels, only the lowest will be available for OW Airlines (AA, BA).

1. Create an account with LAN (LAN Pass)

2. Go to LAN.com, where it says Flights, select LANPASS, enter Buenos Aires and then Bariloche, select your dates, click on search flights, then it will ask you for your User or LANPASS number and your password, the result will give you different awards levels, the lowest price for BUE-BRC is 28.000 Kms, if you see it online, AA or BA (over the phone) should see it too, but in the last few months, LAN is not releasing many seats to their partners (AA, BA etc).

Nice and clear! thanks for the help!

Any ideas on what would be the best way to do this trip? I want to meet my friends and rent a car in Bariloche and then do a road trip for a week or two.

You can find a lot of information on ruta0.com (lot of tips) but the website is in spanish :(

If you use Delta Skymiles, remember that you can do 1 stopover and 1 open jaw, for 20k Skymiles you can do

BUE-USH, stopover for 3~4 days, then USH-FTE (FTE will be your final destination) and stay at FTE for few day.

Rent a car on FTE and drive to BRC, then flight from BRC to BUE, where BRC will be your open jaw ;), you may have to call few times until you find a good Delta Agent that know the rules :D

Federico

PS: or you can do BUE-BRC, rent a card + open jaw, FTE-USH(stopover)-BUE

Is it possible to do an open jaw on the LAN booking using AA miles?

Yes and no, there is no open jaw with AA miles because they offer one-way awards, which at the end is even better. The problem is that LA is not showing their awards to QF/BA (with their online tools), so you best option is get a LAN PASS account and look on Lan.com, since LAN does not let you do a multicity search on their awards, do it like this

Your intinerary is A-B, then C-A right? on Lan.com search first for A-B-A R/T and make sure that you find the lowest award level for A-B, then do the same for C-A-C.

Lan Awards Not Showing on AA System
 

So I called AA and they were only able to find availability on 3 days, even though LAN shows the entire month available. I was able to put a workable iteniary on hold for a few days. My plan is to wait and see if anything else opens up when I call back. Any experience on whether they will open up more seats to AA or not?

Also, I could not get the BA search to show ay of these destinations. Do you need to have Avios for them to come up? I have plenty of Amex miles I could transfer over, if it would be better than using AA miles for this trip.

You might have interpreted the availability on the Lan site wrongly however partner airlines not seeing the same award seats is very common as well.
BA like all OW programmes doesn't recognise many Lan short haul routes for some reason......it's been an ongoing situation for months. Pretty pathetic really. :td: