Reader Daniel asked the following question on the “Ask Lucky” page of the blog:

Do you know of any ways to see LAN availability for AA members within South America online? I’m trying to book some short hops in Chile / Argentina, and the smaller airports (IQQ, ARI, etc.) don’t show up on the BA site.

When it comes to searching OneWorld award availability I find the American website to be the easiest to use. The catch is that they only show award availability on a handful of their partners, including British Airways and Qantas.

If I’m looking to search award availability on Cathay Pacific, Japan Airlines, LAN, etc., I’ll usually just use the British Airways website. But a while back it became a lot less user friendly for actually searching award space on many LAN flights. I’m not sure if this is a real glitch or a convenient “glitch” given that many of these redemptions represent an excellent value and they don’t want to make it easy to book them, but regardless there’s an easy way to get around it.

Say you want to fly from SCL (Santiago, Chile) to ARI (Arica, Chile) — a route operated by LAN — as Daniel does. Usually you’d go to the BA website and enter the origin, destinations, and dates first.

However instead of the next page giving you the results as would usually be the case, it returns an error message saying that destination doesn’t exist, and suggests other logical alternatives, like Molde, Norway.

But there’s a way to trick the system into showing you the space. The website seems to validate the destination airport though not the origin airport at the time of the search. In the last search the system recognized SCL though didn’t recognize ARI. So instead try making ARI your origin and SCL your destination. Just enter an arbitrary outbound date and the return date you were originally looking for.

The search will now return results for both directions without giving you a hard time.

This works for just about all the routes that LAN operates that otherwise don’t display. At the very least the website recognizes Santiago, Lima, and Buenos Aires, out of which LAN operates most of their flights.

While this is useful for searching space, unfortunately it doesn’t really help with booking one-way awards, since the results you’ll get will be roundtrip and originate at the destination. That being said if you wanted to use British Airways Avios to make the booking I’d suggest calling them up and explaining the website wouldn’t let you book the itinerary because it didn’t recognize the cities, and they should hopefully waive the phone booking fee.

Buenos dias from beautiful Buenos Aires. I flew here last night from Miami on LAN Argentina (on a Dallas to Buenos Aires $900 roundtrip business class fare I booked a couple of months back), a flight I was quite excited about since it was my first time flying with the LAN group. While I’ll of course share the full details upon my return, I figured I’d provide a quick rundown of the experience.

Seat

The business class seats are fully flat and actually reasonably comfortable. As is the norm with six across seating on a 767, shoulder room was a bit tight, but having a fully flat seat to South America really is a luxury, given that a majority of airlines offer recliners or angled flat seats. I was able to sleep for a solid four hours, which is about as good as I’ve ever done in business class to South America.

Food

The food was fine. I’d say it was actually marginally worse than American’s catering. There was a salad, appetizer, and cheese plate all on a single tray. Then I had steak as my entree, which was dry as could be, and made American’s domestic steaks look tasty. Then for dessert I had the cheesecake. All in all a decent meal, though nothing that can compete with Austrian or Turkish, for example.

Service

It’s rare I say this, but the crew was horrible. When the flight attendant was taking meal orders I asked if it would be possible to get the cheesecake and ice cream. She looked at me as if I had offended her, said “no,” and then after a moment continued with “we only have enough for one, but maybe if we have extras I could bring you one.” I can’t convey the way she said it, but I was really surprised by the tone.

The service was efficient. Too efficient. It took about an hour into the flight before the meal service began, but once it did it took all of 20 minutes to be served the entire meal. They’d take your trays and give you the next course while you still had food in your mouth.

Then LAN has innovative room service style breakfast ordering cards, so I placed an order for breakfast when I went to sleep. Instead of being awoken by a friendly flight attendant wishing me a pleasant morning, I instead felt like I was being reprimanded for doing something wrong — “if you are going to have breakfast you will take out your tray table and put your seat up now.” And go figure she actually served me someone else’s breakfast by mistake, and when she served me my breakfast the order was still wrong.

Conclusion

Because of the fully flat seat I would choose LAN again if the alternative is an angled flat seat on another airline. However, the food didn’t really impress, and the service definitely disappointed. The flight attendants had no charm and were borderline rude.

All in all, a comfortable though forgettable business class journey…

LAN recently took delivery of their first 787 Dreamliner aircraft, and it seems like they have quite a nice configuration. LAN already had an excellent business class product on the 767 with fully flat beds, though apparently the 787 seats are even more comfortable. Here’s a video of their new 787, and starting about 50 seconds in you can see cabin footage:

As of now the 787 seems to consistently operate the following flights:

LAN 455, Santiago to Buenos Aires, 10:40AM-12:45PM
LAN 456, Buenos Aires to Santiago, 2:30PM-4:50PM

Also, as of December 1, the 787 is scheduled to operate the following flight:

LAN 632, Santiago to Lima, 1:25PM-3:10PM
LAN 633, Lima to Santiago, 6:00PM-11:35PM

LAN’s first longhaul 787 destination will be Los Angeles, and by February 1, 2013, all of LAN’s service there (both the nonstop out of Santiago and the flight through Lima) will be operated by the 787, as follows:

LAN 600, Santiago to Lima to Los Angeles, 9:55PM-07:15AM (+1 day)
LAN 601, Los Angeles to Lima to Santiago, 12:30PM-07:00AM (+1 day)

LAN 602, Santiago to Los Angeles, 11:50PM-6:10AM (+1 day)
LAN 603, Los Angeles to Santiago, 2:45PM-6:05AM (+1 day)

Of course the equipment on all these routes is subject to change. They’re actually already operating the 787 to Los Angeles starting on January 1, though only on certain days of the week, so be sure to check the schedule for the dates you’re traveling.

While LAN is generally great about releasing award space, Los Angeles is definitely one of their tougher destinations for finding award space. That being said I do see business class award space for the 787 flights to Los Angeles, so hopefully I’ll be able to check out their 787 sometime in the new year.

LAN will be starting 5x weekly service JFK-YYZ-JFK on September 3, and has some pretty good introductory fares. The coolest part is that instead of the usual RJ’s on this route you get an internationally configured 767 for this 350 mile flight! Also, the schedule is pretty convenient, with departures from JFK at 11:05AM (arriving in YYZ at 12:45PM), and returns from YYZ at 4:35PM (arriving in JFK at 6:30PM). See this page for all the details.