LAN ARGENTINA - domestic tickets bought by visitors
 

Im looking for recent experiences that visitors (ie. non residents) have had purchasing LAN Argentina domestic flight tickets here in Buenos Aires. If anybody has recently done this or has at least done the due-diligence on this, please post your experience(s) here.

Thanks very much,
Alex / Gaucho100K

I am also interested in this as I want to fly Buenos Aires to Calafate in Feb. Fares are very high for my dates ($700 return or so) I surmise due to a combination of a) higher fares for non-residents and b) peso conversion at the official rate. I know that the first premium is unavoidable but is it possible to buy non resident tickets in pesos and therefore - via blue dollar - reduce the price. If so, I'd see two options - pay cash on arrival after blue dollars have been acquired or get someone I know in Argentina to pay at the blue dollar rate and recompense via an amazon gift voucher or similar. Would welcome any info and views on these points.

You cannot buy travel in pesos without being a resident. Any travel purchases for foreigners must be done on a foreign credit card or with USD at the official rate. I am not sure there is anyway to get around this anymore, unless a local bought them for you, but you'd have to use a fake DNI number.

People used to report buying resident tickets, checking in online and then going directly to the gate without checking bags as a way to get around any DNI check. Doesn't seem worth the risk to me.

Thanks for quick reply. I'm not trying to pay the local resident fare. My question is more can I pay the higher non-resident fare in pesos. I infer from your answer that in fact there isn't a non-resident rate in pesos. Is that correct?

Sorry, I was responding to both threads at once.

They eliminated the ability for foreigners to pay for travel in pesos some time ago. You have to use a foreign credit card or USD. That is a crazy fare, but this is peak summer travel season too.

thanks again mccomb. digging deeper my preferred dates are Feb 16-24 which lan's argentina site prices at 5168 pesos, chile site at 458,000 pesos and us site at $868. Even if I paid for the flights via lan argentina at the peso rate by credit card at official rates this would seem to be cheaper at c $600. However, I infer from your answers that the 5168 pesos price is in fact the local resident rate and shouldn't be booked by non residents. Is that correct?

Fake DNI numbers is a very very risky tactic. I will try to speak with LAN Argentina about this in detail early next week and come back with what they say, but given their play by the book reputation, Im not going to hold my breath.

Using despegar.com, I see $5168 + taxes = $6092. That is indeed the local price.

Aerolineas Argentina is U$S 483.

When you click through after selecting your flight a warning box usually appears informing you that you're booking a resident fare.
I've also heard people have had problems using a foreign issued card when booking flights on the S American websites.

I've rarely heard of anyone using resident fares - not that many would admit to it anyway.

ticket in €
 

I've paid 313€ for a round trip to El calafate with Lan.
départure : enero 22nd
return : febrero 5th

I guess that what is particularly irksome as a visitor is the double-whammy: you have to pay non-res fares and you have to pay them at the artificially-inflated official rate of exchange. That said, personally, I got my intra-Argentina tickets in the LAN "cybermonday" sale last December which brought them back more or less to what they would have been for a resident, so I am a happy bunny.

Some more info would be useful. How did you book it? Is it a resident fare? Are you foreign with no Argentine connections whatsoever?


Should also be said that resident fares aren't always available especially the closer you get to departure nor are they that much cheaper considering the restrictions they come with and the vastly reduced miles earning attached to them.

Very good point !!! ^

Different fares are not a surprise - peak (as mine were) vs non peak, convenience (e.g. 440 am versus daytime to Calafate), early booking, sales, LAN vs Aerolineas all make a difference.

My question is the one noted by NickB - is there any way of avoiding the double whammy of non resident fares at the official exchange rate? My interpretation of the answers is that there isn't - you can't pay cash pesos as a non-resident, and all booking engines use the non-resident peso fare and convert it at the official rate. (As a matter of interest ITA does pull up resident fares but these aren't bookable and the rules clearly state that they are for locals).

My personal response to this is to switch to Mendoza for this trip, using British Airways Avios for BA-MDZ on LAN at 9000 miles + $60 return. Next year I'll return and book BA-Calafate many months in advance in an off-peak month for 18000 miles + about $80 return. As the figures above show, Argentina is the really sweet spot of Avios.

Fair point although all it says is that sometimes there is a single whammy rather than a double whammy.

Now this looks to me like pure Kirchneronomics. CFK would be proud. :) "not that much cheaper"? "vastly reduced miles earning"? mmm... Let us put that to the test, shall we?

AR
The cheapest non-resident ticket on AR on the route that interests me (BUE-IGR) will cost me US$390 and will book in L class. How many miles will I get for this? L class earns at 50% on Flying Blue (or DL Skypesos for that matter) so I will earn 326 miles each way so 652 miles all in all. If we apply the standard rule-of-thumb FT valuation for miles at 1 cent/mile (which, to be honest, is very generous for FB miles but let us not quibble), this means that I will get roughly US$0.65 of value in miles for my US$390.

How does that compare with a resident fare? Well, a return in A class at a resident fare on this route with AR will cost a shadow under AR$2000. If we convert at today's median blue dolar rates, this would be roughly equivalent to US$150. A class only earns at 25% in Flying Blue (or DL) so I would only earn 326 miles, so 326 miles less than what I would earn with the non-resident rate. Let's round that up to US$0.33 that I would "lose" in fewer miles with a resident rate.
So, in return for paying an extra US$240, I get US$0.33 worth of miles. What a deal! how about this Hiddy? next time you are in the UK, I give you GBP3.26 and you give me GBP2400 since apparently this is a fair deal in Hiddynomics. ;)

Now, you might perhaps want to say: but you are not taking into account the fare conditions. And you would be right. So let us look at them. Both the resident and non-resident fares are non refundable, so no difference here. Both are changeable, though, but at a fee. The fee for changes at the resident's fare is AR$150, so approximately US$10.56 at blue rates. The fee for changes at the non-resident fare is US$30. Yippee! Not only do I have to pay more than 2.5 times the price for my ticket but I also have the privilege of having to pay a change fee which is almost 3 times that of the resident fare. Ain't I the lucky one!

Admittedly, this is on AR rather than LA. Are things much better on LA?

LA
In truth, they are a little better. For a start, the cheapest non-resident fare is somewhat lower on LA: it is US$337 (compared to US$390 on AR). OTOH, with BAEC I would earn 0 miles on this fare. In fact, in economy on Lan Argentina, only fully flexible fares (Y,B,H fares) earn anything in BAEC. If I wanted a fare eligible for miles in BAEC, I would have to pay US$471. That just ain't gonna happen. To be fair, things are better in some other FFPs. The US$337 fare, for instance, should in principle earn at 100% in AAdvantage. So one would get roughly US$13 of value in AA miles from that US$337 fare.

The change fee is also somewhat lower than for the resident fare (the lowest LA resident fare is the same as the AR one at slightly under AR$2000): AR$100 instead of AR$150 and the cheapest LA non-resident fare, unlike the AR one, is refundable (at a very reasonable fee of AR$150). So, yes, things are a little better for non-residents with LA. But there is still a very big gap with a cheapest fare at roughly US$150 for residents and US$337 for non-residents and referring to differential mileage earning to partly explain that difference is, frankly, ridiculous.

Don't get me wrong: I can perfectly understand that a government may, for social reasons, want to make sure that affordable fares are available to local residents which are not available to non-residents. I can certainly live with that. What I am less impressed with is being forced on top of that to pay at artificially high rates of exchange.

In any event, whatever the merits of residents-only fares, let us not pretend that they are "not that much cheaper". They very clearly are significantly cheaper (and rightly so, otherwise there would be little point in having them).

[edit]The figures above on valuation of miles are completely wrong with a misplaced comma. But even with a revaluation at 10 times more (which is what it should be), it remains the case that the value of miles is negligible compared to the fare differential.[/edit]