In a nutshell: I changed some dates for some of my LanChile flights through the AA RTW Desk - which as I´ve frequently read here, I found to be fantastic. I really enjoyed the LanChile inflight experience. However, I was upset that they were fiscated in BOG to charge me US$100 for my basic date change. No change in flight number, no change in routing - just a change in date. The old date was on my flight coupon. I tried in my pigeon Spanish to state that one of the best features of these oneworld Explorer fares is their flexibility and that dates could be changed for free as long as no reissue is neccessary. The manager would not relent so I just paid up, requested a receipt and thought that I would try to sort it out later. Want to first of all make sure my information is correct - should I have been charged? If not, what do you think the best course of action to take. Am planning to take the change fee receipt, print out a copy of the fare rules and take it to the LanChile office here in EZE. (where it is rather hot by the way! )

Thanks for any and all advice ...

you said this using pigeon spanish? Heck, my 4 years of high school spanish would not have helped me here.

You should not have been charged anything, and the change fee i thought was only 75usd anyway. However, I doubt you will have any luck in EZE but let us know how it goes.

rich

RichLond -
Thanks very much for the post. I should have added that my pigeon Spanish probably did not communicate what I wanted it to! However, I went to the LanChile ticket office in central EZE today and was amazed and how professional they were about. They knew immediately that the charge was wrong, and called their oneworld desk to confirm. They need to e-mail SCL to authorise the refund and asked me to return tomorrow. No big hassle on my part.

They need to have issued you an MCO and not just a receipt. That is Oneworld rules. If you have that receipt - what EXACTLY does it say on it? Does it say change fee or anything like that?

You might have to bring this up with the head office at SCL but its going to be iffy with this one. I hope you get your money back.

Thanks, Guy Betsy - that´s exactly what they issued - an MCO. Thankfully, it had all the details on it: the record locator and the fact that it was a change fee. I´ll keep you posted.

Sorry to be boring, but this is just another example of why all OWEs should be issued open-dated.

Completely agree. After switing to open tickets everything has been much easier. Looks like nobody questions if you are allowed to change a reservation with an open ticket, also i found it much easier to change routings this way. If you are just connecting thru a different city than originally planed they never charged a change fee.
If your travel agent is not able or willing to issue all sectors after the first intercontinental as open find a new one.

All sorted by the way. Paid the fee by credit card and they refunded me in cash this morning.

Christep and Unterwegs -
If you had all your sectors as open, wouldn't you end up potentially overpaying in tax? I may be very wrong on this, but if you have all your remaining sectors open, every flight would be an origin and destination flight rather than possible connections. I'm fairly sure that in many airports, you don't get taxed (or don't get taxed as heavily) if you are just in transit. Or is there a way to have your ticket open-dated, but have certain sectors linked as connecting so when you put a date in, these sectors would have to be connecting.

No. A connecting flight would show up on your res with a "X" next to the destination. When the taxes are collected, the computer will take this into consideration and not charge you a departing tax when you're just connecting.

GB - the point leroy11 rightly makes is that often I don't have the reservations when I buy the ticket, and frankly I don't necessarily know where I will transit or stopover. So in principle leroy11 is right. As I commented in another thread, if you know that in any case you are going to have to reroute your ticket, and if you are buying it open-dated, and, as we know, you generally do not get charged for changes in taxes when you reroute, then you may be able to save a considerable sum of money by buying your RTW tickets with just a minimum number of (low tax) segments and then reroute later adding all the other segments.

So the point is valid, but frankly it has always seemed like a bit much hassle to me to optimise the tax strategy.

So guess, and if you are wrong, pay at the airport.