Lan Chile only has 5 seats in F on their 767s. Does this make it difficult to impossible to get 2 A class seats for an RTW fare?

Anyone have experience trying?

In my opinion, no. But there are some days when the seats in "A" class are not released for sale.

You have to ask your travel agent to do a NN basis rather than just pull up availability.

Since we're talking about Lan Chile, I was wondering.... Is their F class better on the 767 or 340? What are the differences, if any?
Terence

[This message has been edited by tfung (edited 06-04-2001).]

Travelling with a companion for a 1world rtw earlier this year, I could only secure one confirmed F class seat on our SCL-GIG flight, notwithstanding some full F fare seats still being available.

Luckily, since I was in charge of planning the trip, I secured the 1 available A class seat for myself. At SCL on departure, she was cleared from J to F, but it was kind of a hassle-- seemed like the ground staff weren't too used to last minute changes like this. We had to spend quite a few minutes at the check-in counter while at least 3 different people conferred, calls were made, etc.

At the end of the day, everything worked out fine. For me, it was a win-win situation as I was starting to tire of my travelling companion (indeed, she fled 2/3 of the way through the trip, complaining of exhaustion and exotic diseases of an undetermined nature).

They only release a max of 2 A seats on LA. From experience, though, they were usually not full.

I spoke to AA's RTW desk. They told me that all F seats on LA are on request. AA cannot see the availability and instead has to send a request to LA and hope for the best. The agent I spoke to was optimistic, however, about getting 2 of the 5 seats so long as I booked in advance.

They are full of crap. You can absolutely see A inventory for Lan Chile.

AA has also always told me that all LA F class seats on the 1world explorer are "on request."

If we are talking about the same thing, I still say they are full of crap. I saw, booked, and was confirmed on 6 LA flights that I took in A class in April. LAX-SCL-CCS-SCL-LIM-SCL-LAX. My agent uses Worldspan, and there was no issue. They would only release 2 A class seats at one time, though. The only one that was completely blocked was the IPC flight, that I now see is open. Given that it's winter, I will assume that they only open it at this time of year.

Great airline, by the way. Not the best seats, but the food was the best of all the airlines I flew.

I did LAX-LIM-SCL-GIG-SLC-EZE on Lan Chile with a friend in June of this year. No problem getting two seats in F on the days we wanted.
Good airline. Better seats than AA on the 777 or 767-300 (non suite), but not as good as LH,CX,SQ,QF,BA etc..... Since i dont speek spanish and the englis of some of the flight attendant is very limited the communication was sometimes difficult.
I would use them any time again.

If you speak slowly, they were mostly alright, from my experience. Unlike the CX attendants who wanted to use or practice their English, the LA attendants (who were excellent) were more apprehensive of making a linguistic mistake. So they were very careful when they spoke, until they realized that I understood that they were going to make mistakes and that I really didn't care. Lan Peru was more limited than Lan Chile (which would be expected, imo), but they still spoke more English than I spoke Spanish.

I am still waiting for my LA miles to post, though. EXP will just have to wait.

That's really slow, since you flew in April right? I hope my LA flights in August won't be so slow!

LanChile uses a random number generator to decide whether to post flights to AA or not. I do not believe anyone travelling on an A Class ticket has consistently received miles automatically. Most of the previous posts (and my experience)indicate stories like "1 of 4 flights posted even though all had the FF number on the boarding pass."

Good luck,
rich

Interesting comment regarding LA flight credit posting. I made a roundtrip to SCL using my AA FF number in the booking. both computer generated boarding passes displayed my AAdvantage # and emerald 1world status (I always check for this, figuring it is a confirmation that my FF number was entered correctly).

First flight posted in 3 days, second flight never posted. AA wouldn't research the problem until the publicly advertised 2 month period for posting had lapsed-- so I had to stick my ticket and bp in a file and flag it for a date 8 weeks hence.

AA was really nice about it and forwarded the info with no problem. They didn't ask me to wait (which would have pissed me off to no end), but did say that mileage requests do take between a month and two to post. It's just frustrating because it will give me 100K and a couple of points, so it will give me EXP. Given some changes, I could *really* use a vipow and my EXP card right now. But Rich warned me of it even before I flew, so I expected it. AA said that they get more problems with A and less with D and M.

Oh, and yes, my FF# and status was on every boarding pass. One flight posted. My Lan Peru *return* flight from Cusco to Lima. Go figure...

[This message has been edited by Darren (edited 06-07-2001).]