If you have lots of AA miles and might want a trip to Chile (or somewhere in South America that you can get to from Santiago) next year, stop reading and go put AA first class award seats on hold if there are dates that work for you. Starting early next spring, there are available seats. Lots and lots of seats. Stop reading, go hold some seats! First class seats are 62.5k miles each way, business class seats are 50k. If you can’t find them from your home airport to SCL, try searching from DFW or MIA, or whatever airport is a good positioning option for you.
Didn’t hold any seats? Someone is going to wait a few minutes to read the rest of the article and miss out. Don’t be that person! Don’t know how to hold an AA award reservation? Just keep clicking through the booking process, and click AAdvantage hold when it asks how you want to pay.
Four seats DFW-SCL in August.
Last night when I first noticed this, there were at least 7 (of the 16 total) first class seats every single day from DFW or MIA (usually both) to Santiago, Chile. A few have been booked, and now there are a couple dates with less than 4 seats. Still, most summer dates have 4+ first class seats as well as 2-3 business class (angle-flat) seats. Availability starts in late February 2016 and is excellent from May through the end of the schedule in early September.
Now that you have seats held, what can you do with them? Besides Santiago, you should be able to add flights with award seats on LAN to anywhere in Chile, and possibly Argentina as well. I’m traveling this weekend and won’t have time to do more research or answer questions, but the simplest way to check for those flights will be either searching britishairways.com one segment at a time, or simply calling AA and asking them to add LAN segments to your held itinerary. You have 5 days to work out the details, just make sure you do purchase any tickets you want before the hold expires!
Torres Del Paine National Park. The nearest airport, PUQ, does not show up on a British Airways search. Photo from Wikipedia.
The Atacama desert in Northern Chile. CJC airport is nearby. Photo from National Geographic.
If you book a trip to South America while this rare excellent award availability lasts, I’d love to hear about it in the comments!
– Kenny