slow credit card billing normal?

Old May 12, 2018, 11:25 am
  #1  
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slow credit card billing normal?

I bought an intra-Peru ticket on the USA LATAM site Sunday a week ago (May 6), paid with my LATAM Visa card from US Bank. Shortly after that, I received an email from LATAM saying "Your purchase was successful", and with the reservation code, the itinerary, and a PDF ticket attachment (which says the purchase location was Miami. FL). Sounds good.

But yesterday I checked my US Bank account and the "LAN" (not "LATAM") purchase was showing as pending with the correct purchase amount and the date I booked as the transaction date. But today the pending has dropped off, but I still don't show a charge on my credit card.

Is it normal for a ticket purchase to take so long to show up as a charge on a credit card? Or is it cause for worry that something went wrong with the purchase?

Because LATAM login is currently down, I cannot check to see if it says anything in my account, but looking up a purchase receipt using the reservation code and last name it shows the same thing they emailed me last weekend as a PDF.
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Old May 12, 2018, 2:08 pm
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Do you have a ticket number? It should start with 045

If thats true, you are probably good to go
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Old May 14, 2018, 8:58 pm
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If you have a ticket number, and you can see it in your "my trips" section as valid, you're good to go as Semphyra says
The fact that you booked and paid in the US site may explain at least part of the oddity

the credit card processor LATAM uses for the US site has a deferred capture scheme (meaning that at the time of purchase the website instructs a pre-authorization to the payment processor that will show as "pending" in your statement for some time, until the capture process is executed some days later (this is done to make it easier to comply with some US-specific rules regarding refundability during the first 24-48 hours after purchase). Once the payment is captured (which is done, IIRC, 72-96 hours after purchase) it no longer shows as pending and should become a full blown charge in your statement.

There ends theory

Some things may go wrong during the process (the capture process may fail and leave your payment in a sort of limbo for LATAM)... when this happens, eventually they get the capture OK and the charge appears back in your statement.
On some other cases, the pre-authorization is captured around the same dates in which your bank issues your monthly statement and some bank-related process may prevent the purchase from appearing in your statement for a while
There's a lot of possible cases, most of which are hard to explain but normal... check if your ticket looks still OK and you should be set.

If the ticket is in fact OK, I don't recommend calling LATAM, since the callcenter people don't have a real clue about the way the website systems work so they will probably only check if your ticket is OK and not much more... they won't be able to explain exactly why the charge is taking longer than usual to show up in your statement.
jlarroulet is offline  
Old May 15, 2018, 2:36 pm
  #4  
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Thanks, yes, I do have a valid ticket number, and the charge finally showed up online at US Bank this morning (with yesterday as the posting date; US Bank doesn't show the transaction date until your statement "prints").
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