broland

Oh, you're optimistic! They are the worst in all aspects of travel you might consider. All.

ChocolateFactory

On all my Dreamliner flights my girl-friend and I were upgraded to business class.
Their lounge (and priority check-in) at SCL is beautiful, they have some of the friendliest flight attendants I've ever had.
Their Dreamliners are quite nice - only their A320 was old and dirty. Much like US planes.
I'm a bit of a fan now actually!
The best part however is that I believe all my flights were credited to BA, even though I got the courtesy upgrades (believe, because no miles have been credited yet, neither to LA nor BA - but my BAEC# was on the boarding pass and I was upgraded).

After returning from my first trip to Latin America, I think the key thing is that people just don't speak English.
As soon as you can make yourself understood (either because you find the unicorn that does speak English - or somebody else can translate for you), the service was actually always quite good.

iahphx

Yes, it is very true that if you travel around Latin America, some knowledge of Spanish (I'm assuming Portuguese is hopeless) is very useful. I travel pretty much everywhere in the world, and there is no question in my mind that -- for what a traveler is likely to encounter -- English skills are the lowest in Latin America. I've always assumed this is because Latin America is big, mostly mono-lingual and geographically isolated. In other words, they don't need your stinkin' English. I tell my kids and their friends that Spanish is therefore the best language to take in school. I also await the better deployment of translation software on my cellphone.

ChocolateFactory

It's not just that. Everybody keeps complaining about bad service in Latin America, and that's just not my experience. We were treated really well everywhere, once communication issues were solved.
(Though I have to admit I have also read about a lot of bad experiences from people fluent in Spanish - that just hasn't been my experience so far.)

DrHalxx

Did you have both numbers on ? BA and LATAM? Where you a LATAM black card holder?

rp88

Anyone able to get matched without submitting a recent flight booking? Anyone know if you can just submit a pending LATAM flight that I haven't actually flown yet?

zeer0

Glad Lucky found the thread useful and got the match

http://onemileatatime.boardingarea.com/2018/01/11/latam-status-match/

ChocolateFactory

Booked through LATAM's callcenter. Four flights, the website showed that flights 2 and 3 were eligible for the upgrade once checkin would open (the others did not have a business class).
At the airport for flight 1, got my boarding pass without a frequent flyer number (wanted to be safe), but then asked them to enter my BA number anyway because I wanted to get priority boarding.
The agent could see my BA Gold status, but said something went wrong, it was not saved, so I did not get a new boarding pass (I ended up just showing my BA card to the gate agent).
So I assumed that my booking was still free from a frequent flyer number.
I then applied for the courtesy upgrade for the next flight.
For this I again had to enter the booking number manually ("no bookings found") - obviously the booking was not linked to my LATAM profile.
The upgrade cleared and at the airport I got a boarding pass with my BA number on!
The same thing happened with my third flight, the fourth one I haven't taken yet.
No LATAM number on the boarding pass.

...And I just saw that the miles indeed were credited to BA.

iahphx

So I've now tried ChocolateFactory's strategy 3 times, and each time I've received a (different) response indicating that the agent knows nothing about a status match program. So this is looking increasingly like a unicorn. I guess I could try again, but has anyone had any different outcome recently?

ChocolateFactory

Did you have a LATAM flight in the last 12 months?

iahphx

I did -- and I attached the confirmations. But the responses I'm getting back from the staff are that they don't care about what I submit. They just tell me there are no status matches.

potus18

Or if anybody booked a flight and no-showed?

LuoboTiX

Perhaps they've closed this internal unpublished promotions since recently with another wave of "Go get your OW Emerald by matching LATAM" blogs you may see everywhere...Anyway I would keep trying in your case and inquiry via SNS channels simultaneously...

DrHalxx

I just started the process through facebook and they created a file for me. I received an email last night asking for a previous LATAM booking. It is still going on

Mauibaby2008

After almost 5 weeks of waiting, I was granted Black !!!!

i was just flying through HKG and it would have been nice to access the F lounges instead. Oh well

good thru March 2019