Chile Forum

For years people have been able to purchase lan.com flights at the lowest fare buckets via the lan.com "Chile version" site. These fare buckets have no citizenship or residency requirements but are only offered on their "Chile version" site.

Over the years, the Chilean Lan IT folk have tried to hinder this by removing the "Chile version" site as an option from the main menu when accessed internationally. You could still get to the site if you used some web savvy or knew the right URL but then the obstacle became having the foreign credit card fail to automatically process half the time. Most non-Spanish speaking folk would probably give up at this point and their reservation automatically cancelled after a certain period of time but other folk discovered that calling into the Santiago call center would result in a fully booked ticket. Now the brilliant IT folk at Lan have finally closed that loophole as you now cannot get past the stage after choosing yout flights receiving this message:

Estimado cliente, los vuelos escogidos no permiten ningún pago a través de LAN.com

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Only options left:
(1) wait till you get here (but Lan has their best prices on their regular tariffs at 21 days advance purchase)
(2) have someone you trust do the reservation on lan.com from inside Chile
(3) use a Chile https enabled proxy (with the caveats regarding the security of your data)

eeuunikkeiexpat wrote: Now the brilliant IT folk at Lan...

They are quiet brilliant...a lot of them are students of mine, so what else would they be? hehe

I'm going to ask one of them about this to see how they comment on it. Should be interesting to hear LAN's point of view as to why they do this.
But, of course, IT only made the system changes. They may not have an actual opinion on discriminatory pricing. So, I suppose it would be best to ask around in some other commercial areas.

I commented on a similar post a while ago... it has always beens LAN's policy to charge different fares to people booking outside Chile. I know because I worked for them. So there is no policy change, like eeuu said, they finaly tightened everything up and closed some of the loop-holes.

I am finding it interesting that it took them sooooo long, and they still have only sort of managed to control foreign access. Considering there is less than a handful of Chilean ISP's, it would be fairly easy to stop access from outside the country.

Makes me almost half inclined to create a proxy on the Chile forum for everyone to use (not that interested).

Clients can have my secretary do it ( perks to contracting us ), and we do accept all foreign credit cards ( likly a bigger perk ).

Great, so what is one supposed to do when travelling outside Chile?

James.

I used the LAN Spanish language site to book my last trip, seems they only give a fraction of the rewards miles under these circumstances (fare class).
Anyway, if you're like me and collect a lot of FF miles, this is sort of a deal breaker.

It seems to vary from season to season as to whether they have cheap fare codes for which they don't give you all the miles. They always seem to give 100% internationally though (unlike BA and Iberia).

James.

Clients can have my secretary do it ( perks to contracting us ), and we do accept all foreign credit cards ( likly a bigger perk ).

I am with you, Chaz.

yea, if the bottom falls out of the legal and relocation buisness, I just need to hang a tourism agency shingle out the door. We already do a lot of unofficial travel agency type work for ourselves and clients. A lot of our buisness (just to do our buisness) is centered around getting people from point A to point B, and we have lots of lodges, hotels, and other tourism buisness that are either clients already or at least contacts where our clients have stayed, we have stayed, friends, and so on. Perhaps someday I will spin one off, just not on my high priority list at the moment.

Perhaps an allchile.net airline.

You won't have any competition to speak of. Model it after Westjet and you will conquer South America.

Rock on, jefe!

contact Carlson Wagonlit's office in Santiago, via email; and have one of their wonderful agents book it for you. They were invaluable in booking our Sky Airlines flights for internal travel in Chile.

Skraeling wrote:You won't have any competition to speak of. Model it after Westjet and you will conquer South America.

Rock on, jefe!

Only problem with that is that there isn't enough air traffic in Chile. One of the reasons LAN stays dominant is because it isn't profitable for another airline to take some of the routes... there are a couple routes that LAN runs that barely turn a profit as it is. Toss another airline in there and no one is making any money.

Plus for domestic flight LAN is dirt cheap...$70 round trip to La Serena (all taxes included). It would be hard for anyone to under sell that... even WestJet.