LAN performance during IRROPs

[pilot]

I had an interesting experience last week on Lan, which shows they have a lot of work to do in the Customer Service department.

I was scheduled to fly SCL - EZE last Wednesday. I checked in online the night before, and arrived at the airport an hour before scheduled departure (7:40 am) only to find that SCL was shut down do to fog...c'est la vie, doesn't happen very often, but is a mess when it does. I'm Silver Premier (OW Sapphire), so I headed down to the Neruda lounge, and waited for conditions to get better.

At about 10 am the airport re-opened and the delayed flights started departing. Soon, flights with scheduled departure times later than ours (I was travelling with a collegue) were being called while ours still showed as delayed. My friend went to the desk to ask what was up and soon came back rather agitated: the flight had been cancelled and we needed to get new boarding passes for a later flight.

There were several people in the line to get alternate flights, so I had my friend stand in the line while I called LAN reservations to see if we could get reassigned to the next available flight. (I was a United 1K in a previous life, and call the 1K line was SOP when flights were cancelled.) After explaining to the agent the situation, she said she couldn't make any changes, as the flight was under "airport control". She also said that if I wanted to make any changes on the phone, I'd have to pay a change penalty plus any fare difference. I was on the verge of laughter, but thanked her for her non-help, and she pleasantly reminded me that they were available 24 - 7. Not sure what for, as they clearly aren't empowered to actually help.

So went back to the line, and after having an interesting conversation with the lone agent as to whether we preferred to be on the 11 or 11:15 flight (we wanted to be on the *next* flight out, really didn't care which one that was), finally got boarding passes indicating the flight departed from gate 20.

After heading up to gate 20 and waiting for 30 minutes with no gate agents in sight (yes, there was a plane there), we started getting suspicious, especially when the crew for our flight showed up looking equally puzzled. I went exploring and at gate 18, asked the gate agent whether this was the flight to Buenos Aires. She looked at me like that was the dumbest question she'd ever heard, to which I replied by showing her my boarding pass with Gate 20 printed on it.

So we finally got on, and after waiting yet another hour, pushed back and made our way to EZE.

I understand airlines are not responsible for the weather, but they certainly do have a lot of say in how they respond to these situations. As a moderately elite LAN flyer, I can only wonder how the treat the non-elites. It's too bad they are operating virtually unopposed in many of these routes, they are starting to act very complacent. I wish a viable competitor would show up.

Thank you for reading my little rant, I fell much better now :p

BTW, LAN cancelled last nights flight to AKL/SYD, and tonights nonstop to LAX. Don't know what's up with that, but any FT'ers scheduled to fly LAN the next few days may want to keep on eye on this.