Feasibility of Easter Islands (IPC) award
 

Hi!

I am not a Oneworld member yet but am looking into extending a trip to South America on to the Easter Islands.
As of now prices for SCL-IPC-SCL are usually in the $800-900 range with one exception ($570) in December (12th-19th).
The prices seem pretty steep for the flight but as LAN is the only airline it's obvious they are trying to protect their high prices.

My idea is to gather some OW miles (i.e. through magazine subscriptions, ...) and then book an award to IPC from SCL, EZE, GRU, GIG.

My questions are:

- Based on old threads it is actually possible to go there as part of an award. Does it still count as South America or does another mileage requirement apply?
- How likely is it to get an award within a given month, i.e. March 2008? As of now I am pretty flexible on the dates.
- Does it actually make sense to go for an award to save a few bucks or should I just buy a ticket? OW Miles for the trip itself are not important to me as I'm usually flying on StarAlliance.

Thanks,
Hendrik

Hendrik, yes, you can get to IPC as part of an award and many people here have done this. Or as part of a xONEx.
But, LA has the habit to make only a fraction of the award seats available to other OW members. I was trying to book PPT-IPC as a QF award next year and there is no availability at all over a 5 months period. LANPASS however shows availability on almost every flight.
So if you have no plans to fly OW anywhere in the near future I'd suggest you join LANPASS for this. You will need 45,000km for this award. When you sign up to LANPASS online you get 5000km bonus, so you need another 40k. That would be for example 20k SPG points (actually gives you 50k km).
I see you are an Amex Platinum, so maybe you can transfer points from Amex to SPG and then to LAN. There might be many other ways as well.

Easter Island, for the purpose of the oneworld partner award is part of the South Pacific Zone, not the South America Zone. Making use of this award makes sense for those coming from the South Pacific, but not when you have to cross zones as is the case if you fly from the East. Another good way to reach IPC is with a oneworld award, which is distance based, not zone based, but that award is not applicable if all you want is to travel from a South America gateway to IPC and back.

For paid tickets the only sensible way to go to IPC is to make use of the South America Airpass (see lan.com), or as part of the oneworld explorer, a RTW fare.