Chile Forum

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OK, so admin hates SKY and I hate LAN. At least SKY gives you access to the lower fare classes whether you're in Chile or elsewhere. Unlike LAN.

Today's little chat is about paying for a SKY ticket using a credit card from outside of Chile. Most people already know this, but ....

If you happen to be inside Chile and you access the SKY website, your evil browser may default to assuming you are in Chile and then SKY will think you are as well. If SKY thinks you are in Chile it will likely exclude credit cards that are "international" or rather, from a bank outside the Chilean system. And then SKY will often reject your attempt to use a credit card from outside of Chile.

It appears that the solution to this rejection is to start at the home page for SKY and select the country in which your credit card bank is located. If you select the US or Canada from the beginning, when you get to the payment step you'll have the option of using credit cards from those countries, as well as a paypal option. However, even if you don't really live in or have banking in the US or Canada, but somewhere else (Andorra, for example, or the Cayman Islands, or....?) you will still get the option to use paypal.

Don't know if that might be useful to someone.

Sometimes it is also possible to make an online reservation which will give you 24 hours to pay for your booking at your nearest sales office...

patagoniax wrote:.
OK, so admin hates SKY and I hate LAN. At least SKY gives you access to the lower fare classes whether you're in Chile or elsewhere. Unlike LAN.

Today's little chat is about paying for a SKY ticket using a credit card from outside of Chile. Most people already know this, but ....

If you happen to be inside Chile and you access the SKY website, your evil browser may default to assuming you are in Chile and then SKY will think you are as well. If SKY thinks you are in Chile it will likely exclude credit cards that are "international" or rather, from a bank outside the Chilean system. And then SKY will often reject your attempt to use a credit card from outside of Chile.

It appears that the solution to this rejection is to start at the home page for SKY and select the country in which your credit card bank is located. If you select the US or Canada from the beginning, when you get to the payment step you'll have the option of using credit cards from those countries, as well as a paypal option. However, even if you don't really live in or have banking in the US or Canada, but somewhere else (Andorra, for example, or the Cayman Islands, or....?) you will still get the option to use paypal

Don't know if that might be useful to someone.

Many thanks Px for this very useful information! Ah, little Andorra is a gem of a country but, thankfully, not in the 'tax avoidance' league of the Cayman Islands.

To clarify my position, I dislike sky because we fly sky all the time but we essentialy have to fly everything from sky to cesnas with bailing wire holding on the tail lights because it is the only plane going where we need to go when we need to go. To sky I have to say they meet that reuirement more than anyone else. Just the experience is not the concorde.

patagoniax wrote:Don't know if that might be useful to someone.

I added content of the initial post of this thread to the allchile.net wiki 'air travel' article (though the article needs a bit of a cleanup).

admin wrote:To clarify my position, I dislike sky because we fly sky all the time but we essentialy have to fly everything from sky to cesnas with bailing wire holding on the tail lights because it is the only plane going where we need to go when we need to go. To sky I have to say they meet that reuirement more than anyone else. Just the experience is not the concorde.

So what you are saying is that you don't care for Sky because they fly where you need to go and LAN gets a pass because they don't go where you need to go? I am so very confused.

With "very" vague recollection of my attempt to book Sky on the interwebs about 2 years ago, I couldn't do it with an Aussie credit card. Ended up going to the Sky office outside Jumbo Alto Las Condes. The staff member was great, and I ended up with a cheaper fare than if I had paid over the net!
I know Px is not close to that office but for anyone who is, it might be worth the trip!

patagoniax wrote:

admin wrote:To clarify my position, I dislike sky because we fly sky all the time but we essentialy have to fly everything from sky to cesnas with bailing wire holding on the tail lights because it is the only plane going where we need to go when we need to go. To sky I have to say they meet that reuirement more than anyone else. Just the experience is not the concorde.

So what you are saying is that you don't care for Sky because they fly where you need to go and LAN gets a pass because they don't go where you need to go? I am so very confused.

I bought from Sky this morning using their website. Round trips to Temuco for 4. In summary:

Pro:

1. Price, price, price!

Cons:

1. Could not set up a multi route flight (we're driving Santiago down with a friend, then flying back up. So had to go with 2 separate transactions).
2. All attempts to pay failed. Sort of. Could not use master card (as it shows, so expected), would not let me use my Paypal (which is allowed but just kept failing...possibly because my paypal is set up with my master card) and when using my visa, the last message I got was "Error [some numbers] and try again later". However, when entering the exact same flights to try again later, I got another message saying the exact itinerary was already in my history..was I sure I wanted to continue.

Not wanting to pay twice I left it and figured I'd go to their office and ask what is going on. A couple hours later though, I received confirmation emails of my purchase. A little bizarre.

3. No ability to check my account online (and confirm the purchase) or to pick my seats. When travelling with younguns it'd be nice to confirm we're all sitting together but I guess we'll leave that up to the gate when we check in.

All that aside though, I'd go with this pain to get the much cheaper price. About 2 to 3 times more with LAN right now (summer season).