Gavin

I will be in Chile in November and am planning to fly from Punta Arenas from Santiago when there. Lan has the best schedule for us. Unfortunately if I go to lan.com and tell the truth about where I live, Canada, I only get access to the full economy fare. If I say that I live in Chile the fare is about 500 USD less for a restricted fare. There is a thread on the Latin America board indicating that some people have been OK travelling on the Chilean fare. I phoned Lan's 800 line and was told that if I booked the lower fare I would be charged the difference on check-in.

Can anyone offer any insights or ideas?

someotherguy

Just a guess:

Try Googling for IATA rules on SOTO SOTI SITO SITI (sold out/in country, ticketed out/in country).

Jeff_Costa_Rica

I have walked into LAN offices in Chile and purchased tickets for domestic flights and gotten the "in Chile" fare. But I had a LOT of flexibility in schedule and a LOT of time to play around with in order to meet 21-day advance-purchase requirements to get less expensive fares.

Whether that system is still in effect, I can't say.

Gavin

Someotherguy I did as you sugested and found out that IATA changed the rules about different prices depending upon where the ticket is issued. The old order was done in by people booking online. I have not yet found onything about residency requirments to get certain airfares.

Jeff, your idea does not work for us because we arrive in Santiago four days before our flight south.

Thanks for the ideas. any more?

Mochi

Why don’t you check with LanChile office in the North America for "visitor fares"?

We went to Chile in Nov of 2004 and flew Santiago to Punta Arenas and Santiago to Calama (4 segments, 2 round trip p.p.). I don’t recall how much we paid, but it was very reasonable. The price was quoted per segment, not where you fly. LanChile was giving further discount on visit fares for travelers flying into Chile via LanChile. We flew AA to Santiago, but their non-discounted visitor fare was still a good price.

Gavin

Mochi, I called LAN's North America number and got the same very high fare as the web site has. I asked if there were any discounts available and was told that this was the only fare available. Our flight from Toronto to Santiago is with Air Canada so no discount available on that account. I guess we will go with the competition even though the schedules are not quite as good for us.

woodie

Gavin:

We took that flight a couple of years ago after a long trip into Santiago from Canada.

But to your question, I doubt that you will get anywhere trying to buy a resident ticket.

More and more, airline attendants want to see a passport at the various stages of travel. Obviously that will be a dead give away. I also expect that the south american agents at all levels are on the lookout for such attempts.

We wanted to have the international luggage weight allowance as well. Travelling from Canada direct to Punta Arenas with a switch in Santiago placed our whole trip on the international level so we had no problem with our luggage weight on the local flight from Santiago to Punta Arenas. Excess luggage can cost quite a bit.

Help?

Have a great trip.

Woodie

Gavin

After jumping through a few hoops we have our prefered flights with LAN booked at a reasonable fare. The answer was in a post on the Latin America board: use a travel agent in Chile. Like that poster I used Cocha. Initially it looked like I could book directly from their website but that did not work and I had to do it the old-fashioned way using a human agent. They required a faxed authorization to charge my credit card along with photocopies of passports and the credit card.