An Inauspicious Beginning To The South America Trip

You can’t say I wasn’t warned.  I knew Lan 800 had a reputation for being late even when I booked it 11 months ahead of time.  But I didn’t have any choice, it was the only flight available on the day I wanted that had award seats via AAdvantage available.  I thought we were pretty safe since there was almost 4 hours layover in Santiago before the connection to Guayaquil.

A couple weeks before our scheduled departure, I started stalking the flight to see how it had been running lately.  The news wasn’t great – 75% on time stats meant that 25% of the flights were late.  Some excessively so, even 8 hours late!

I was even more worried when a story came on the news about strikes by Border Protection staff.  They did postpone some of the strikes due to the terror attacks in Brussels but resumed them a week later.

MARCH 31

Sydney International Airport — 12 midnight to 12.15am

Melbourne International Airport — 4am to 12 midday and 4pm to 12 midnight

Adelaide Airport — 5am to 1pm and 4pm to 12 midnight

Brisbane International Airport — 5am to 1pm and 5pm to 12 midnight

We were lucky-they didn’t affect the Brisbane domestic terminal for the BNE-SYD flight and the Sydney strike would end at 12:15am, well before our departure.

We only had carry-on backpacks with well-stuffed Scottevests to avoid checking any bags and get around the 7kg limit (camera gear is heavy!) so we were prepared for tight connections.

There was also a hassle over our pre-booked seats.  To maximize sleep time, I had chosen the last two seats in the middle section of economy that had a lavatory wall directly behind them.  We aren’t the reclining types and I wanted to avoid potential seat kickers behind us.  When we checked in at BNE, we got boarding passes for completely different seats not even together!  I went straight to LAN customer service at Sydney and complained showing the print-out of our pre-booked seats.  Those seats were gone but she did give us the front row of economy – bulkhead which had been freed up probably by some elite getting upgraded.  I was thrilled – nobody reclining into us!  We actually had 2 different seats – 2nd row of economy for the SYD-AKL segment and 1st row for AKL-SCL, the long one.

As it turned out, the flight was late arriving from Auckland so our flight was delayed but at least only a couple hours so we wouldn’t miss the connection to Guayaquil but I was still biting my nails until the plane left Sydney.  They did give us food vouchers so we bought a sandwich and some biscuits to keep on hand in case we got hungry later.

DSCN0261 DSCN0268

Transiting AKL is a pita.  Even though it is the exact same plane continuing onwards, you have to get off with all your carry-ons, schlep them all the way down the hall to security, put them through security and trudge back to where the plane was parked – of course the furthest gate from security!

After all that, we were relieved that the plane had no further delays and settled into our bulkhead seats.  Just then, a man approached us and asked if one of us wanted to change seats……………………………………!!!!!!

To be continued!