Before LATAM quits oneworld – an Avios flight redemption to Santiago, Chile with £44 tax

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• BJ says:

  29 Sep29 September 06:16

  I totally forgot there was a BA option. Thanks for the reminder; helps with decisions.

• Alex W says:

  29 Sep29 September 07:38

  London to Santiago can be had for £600 direct in economy on BA. So the LATAM redemption option is not great value, but still makes the BA redemption look laughable.

• TripRep says:

  29 Sep29 September 08:00

  Just did a quick comparison for off-peak…

  Flying from the Highlands with BA it’s about £100 cheaper than LHR, a total of £478 and 175k points in CW

  So although you avoid APD, the BA YQ/CIS to SCL from INV is more at £406, it’s £349 from LHR.

  • BJ says:

    29 Sep29 September 08:06

    Plus the option to use a 241.

• KevMc says:

  29 Sep29 September 08:03

  We flew MAD-SCL with Iberia and SCL-MAD with LATAM over Easter. The Iberia leg cost us £83.50/51,000 avios each, with the LATAM leg being another £40/90,000 avoid each. Tagged on an economy Avios return to MAD from LHR, as well as an internal flight within Chile to get down to the Lake District area, and the whole trip cost us less than £300 cash and around 330k Avios for the pair of us.

  The trip felt like great value, even if just compared to the direct BA redemption cost, but even more so as it was during the school hols and we booked it quite late (booked end Jan to go early Apr). We will definitely look at going to SA via MAD the next time we venture that way. And hopefully internal LATAM flights will still be able to be redeemed using virgin points

• Neal says:

  29 Sep29 September 10:38

  Stop calling the bogus fees taxes.
  It is getting annoying.

  • Lady London says:

    29 Sep29 September 11:44

    +1. When the extra money demanded by British Airways is so very higher (clearly a multiple of over 7 times thé actually required taxes and airport fées, in this type of article it’s time to start calling it what it is – extra fees BA demandes for you to be able to use your Avios that you already paid to earn.

    I know you’re already doing it by lining up the fees across the airlines for the same trip, Rob. But when the differences are so much higher and all the extra money is kept by British Airways, on this scale and in this type of article, reference to the fact that of £355 co-pay on your award ticket, at least £311 is being kept by British Airways as well as your avios and is not taxes and is not airport fees would be in order.

    • xcalx says:

      29 Sep29 September 12:53

      +1 I wonder if BA would cut out the Advertorials and such If Rob constantly referred to the charges they impose as rip of fees, instead of the more BA acceptable term “taxes” Maybe, a bit of don’t bite the hand that feeds logic.

      • Lady London says:

        29 Sep29 September 19:48

        I’m OK with that. In line with Rob’s answers to another poster who challenged in past couple of days that Rob could say more in comments than in actually articles, actually Rob has cône as far as hé can with the figures ‘above the line’ , laying it out for us so we as reader can calculateur how much extra money BA is taking for itself as well as Avios, on your award ticket. It may be only we as readers can take that extra step as we are allowed to be inaccurate or biased but Rob really isnt. My préférence though would be that Rob doesnt call the whole amount taxes but maybe something like ‘taxes and co-pay’.

    • Doug M says:

      29 Sep29 September 20:31

      What do you object to, the misuse of ‘taxes’ as a a term, or the amount you have to pay? BA are not going to swallow a huge chunk of revenue disappearing, so regardless of term used, one way or another you’re going to pay. If you look at short haul they’ve really provided the option to pay all the cost in Avios, if that was an option long haul would people be happy? New York 100K Avios and £600 or 220K Avios?
      I’d say part of an escalation in these additional charges is the ease with which Avios can be earned outside of flying. Expecting to have lifelong returns around the world off the back of grocery shopping and using an Amex when doing it was unrealistic, it may have been nice, but it wasn’t sustainable.
      I’m sort of surprised people get quite so excited about this, the taxes and airport charges being set out are just as bad as the YQ in principle, yet that doesn’t seem to anger people in quite the same way. I don’t buy a box of cereal in the supermarket and get asked for 1p contribution to the delivery lorry having to drive into the congestion charge zone, so why would I care that an airline has to give £4 to the airport for this, and £7 for that, I just care what the ticket costs in the end.

      • Will says:

        29 Sep29 September 21:10

        Doug, I’m relatively care free about what people want to call the fees but it’s untrue that they are all taxes.

        What I would point out is that it isn’t really that outrageous to expect a scheme designed to reward frequent flying with some actual rewards.

        There are instances where you can buy economy tickets for the same or less as the tax and fees on an economy return to, for example, the USA. That’s a bit rediculous.

        It’s also not true that you could travel round the world on the back of shopping at Tesco and putting that spend on an amex. Even if you spend £10k a year on groceries which is on the high side you might be able to earn 15k avios and £100 of clubcard which gets you another 24k avios. 39k avios isn’t going to get you much even with a companion ticket.

        • Doug M says:

          29 Sep29 September 23:11

          I specifically said misuse of the term taxes. I know what’s a tax and what is going to the airline. I was asking whether peoples real concern is the description used by Rob, or just the cost.
          You’re comparing a completely non-refundable economy ticket with flexible award economy ticket. You will not get a cash economy ticket with similar flexibility to a redemption for anything like the taxes and fees on the redemption. It needs to be a like for like comparison.
          There were loads of Tesco offers where people bought items solely to get disproportionate amounts of Avios. Printer ink springs to mind. Whilst there may not be as many Avios available from non-flying as there used to be, there are still many.

        • Lady London says:

          30 Sep30 September 00:00

          It was true, Will, it was.
          sadly, I missed out on that too.
          I wasn’t in the game then.
          and I’m not smart enough anyway.
          But others were.

          Have you ever heard of the legendary Squills ?

      • Lady London says:

        29 Sep29 September 23:55

        @Doug M re your comment “the ease with which Avios can be earned outside of flying”… [is the problem].

        Ummm and who’s been selling all those Avios to Tesco (in the past) and Amex, then? Which company got the money for those Avios that were sold….?

        This sounds awfully similar to Eurostar taking a bung from Amex to let all Platinum cardholders into Eurostar lounges. The Plat cardholders took up the invitation, and now Eurostar has basically vastly increased the requirements on its own customers to achieve the status level that gets those passengers into Eurostar lounges! And Eurostar is saying effectively “our lounges are too crowded now, so we thought we’d make it easier for you, our own high spending customers, to access the lounges by making you spend much, much more money with us in the first place in order to qualify for the status that gets you into our lounge, so that we’ll exclude quite a lot of you ? !!!

        So BA (or whoever) flooded the market with Avios, taking big chunks of money for this from supermarkets, credit card companies, and petrol stations who bought those avios off British Airways (presumably) to give to their customers. And now the problem is that we have to pay loads of taxes er… sorry Carrier Imposed Surcharges, because …er…. enough of us have enough avios to actually use them ? someone;s having a laugh here… !

        • Doug M says:

          30 Sep30 September 10:12

          Oh yes, BA are selling those Avios for sure. I’m no economist, and no one outside of very senior BA/IAG will know what they’re being sold for. But I was trying to point to a possibility as to why the additional payments when using them on Long haul are so high. I think Avios are almost an alternate currency rather than a frequent flyer unit. Ultimately the fees are what they are because enough people still use the scheme for it to be a real money maker.
          My ultimate points remains, are people angry at the level of these charges, or them being misdescribed (outside of BA where it clearly offers a breakdown) as tax. I suspect they are really about the former but always point to the latter as a way to vent.

  • TripRep says:

    29 Sep29 September 12:37

    +1

    It feels lazy or misguided journalism. Or maybe BA have have voiced their displeasure for HFP separately referring to APD and Carrier Imposed Surcharges? (Note: they are absolutely NOT fuel surcharges)

    So then Rob, can you enlighten us as to why you persist with incorrectly referring to them as “Taxes”, is it to increase the number of comments/article?

    • Rob says:

      29 Sep29 September 19:10

      Shortest word I can find.

      • Shoestring says:

        29 Sep29 September 19:15

        fees

        • ChrisC says:

          29 Sep29 September 23:22

          which is also more accurate when describing the BA surcharge.

        • ADS says:

          30 Sep30 September 10:09

          +1

          the more we use the word “taxes” … the more likely BA will keep increasing their fees !

      • Lady London says:

        29 Sep29 September 23:58

        there’s another short word I can think of and it begins with ‘f’

      • TripRep says:

        30 Sep30 September 13:51

        Really???

        Ok then that is both lazy and misguided.

        • Alex G says:

          30 Sep30 September 14:39

          +1

        • Rob says:

          30 Sep30 September 17:19

          Those headlines need to be short and sweet!

        • TripRep says:

          1 Oct1 October 06:27

          “Those headlines need to be short and sweet”

          They also **need** to be factual.

          Expect similar comments every time you deliberately elect to give out a misleading headline, we want HFP to be better than the gutter press..

      • Alex G says:

        30 Sep30 September 14:39

        Sorry but that is ridiculous!

        Call them “taxes and fees” (or just “fees” if you think an extra two words, it two too many).

        • TripRep says:

          1 Oct1 October 06:29

          Alex G +1 totally agree, tbh I’m amazed with Robs dismissive response. He sounds like a polictical keen on sound bites and fake news.

• Kenny says:

  29 Sep29 September 10:50

  “ Business Class on Iberia between Madrid and Santiago is 150,000 Avios peak / 102,000 Avios off-peak return plus £168”
  Does that mean I’ll need to create an Iberia account, transfer Avios across from BA and then only be able to book?

  • Rob says:

    29 Sep29 September 11:00

    Yes. And you can’t transfer until the IB account is 90 days old and has earned 1 Avios (Amex MR transfer is ok)

• ChrisC says:

  29 Sep29 September 11:54

  AA has already pulled code share flights – cash and rewards – with LATAM from its system.

  Existing bookings will be honoured though. as will OW benefits such as lounge access.

  • Lady London says:

    29 Sep29 September 20:36

    Any excuse to avoid passengers buying tickets AA might have to pay another airline for I suppose.

    Wonderful how alliances work, isn’t it? Latam isn’t even out the door (and wont be for a very long time) and already alliance benefits are being withdrawn from passengers.

• Anon says:

  30 Sep30 September 09:34

  All future LATAM bookings should be eligible for Avios / tier points until they have officially exited (which could be a while in the future), right?

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