After doing some research on flight times, availabilty, and now mileage posting, it seems like traveling to SA on a OWE is not worth the headaches if you're only going for the miles.

SCL - CCS, the juiciest route, only operates twice per week and only one of those has an immediate return time.

I've decided to swap South America for Australia, despite the lack of three class service down under and the less juicy mileage. Better scheduling, availability, and faster mileage posting put me over.

I still say AA is full of crap, but in their defense, they just don't know it. I had to deal with this today, and my experience might shed some light on the subject. While talking to AA RTW desk, the agent could not see A inventory at all for LA flights. By this time, I know the agent well enough to tell her that something is wrong, so she calls LA to get an answer of what is happening. Boom, LA says two seats are open. But AA can't see them. Turns out that LA uses Amadeus (sp?) and of course AA uses Sabre and that LA A inventory can not be seen by the AA agents. So the LA agent took the record, inserted the segments, and gave the AA agent the record back. No problem, other than lack of availability on the way back, which I am not so worried about. Two seats are open, and the LA agent waitlisted me on the flight. I now see that I didn't have the issue before because my TA was using Worldspan and not Sabre. I will assume that WS was able to see the inventory fine. So if you want a seat, have the agent make the call to LA. Otherwise, I suppose I would suggest that you just book in D, and call LA and make an open ended reservation in A class. Should work, though maybe there would be a problem that I don't have enough experience to see....

Good luck and happy flying. http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/smile.gif

"A" inventory on LanChile does not show in native Sabre. It only shows with a Direct Connect entry, where you tell Sabre to inquire directly with the airline's host system. The agent was probably not trained or not aware.

The agent was doing a direct connect, and she still could not see it.