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Beginning October 5, 2017, LATAM will fly a Boeing 787-9 three times a week on its first non-stop route to Australia, between Santiago, Chile and Melbourne, Australia. Here’s what the flight time looks like.
- Santiago to Melbourne, which departs at 12:55 PM and arrives at 5:55 PM the following day (LA805)
- Melbourne to Santiago, which departs at 7:55PM and arrives at 7:00 PM the same day (LA806)
LATAM currently flies Santiago to Auckland to Sydney.
The Santiago to Melbourne quite a long flight at over 15 hours in duration–actually the longest LATAM’s ever flown–so the fact that there’s plenty of Business Class award space is good news. The addition of more Business Class award space is good news in general for a destination that can be hard to find premium cabin award space to.
The Product
LATAM’s Business Class on the Boeing 787-9 has fully flat beds that look like this:
The seats are arranged in a 2-2-2 configuration, which means you’ll want to pick a middle seat if you want to avoid being climbed over in the middle of the night or having to climb over anyone else.
Here’s a trip report from airlinereporter.com flying LATAM Business Class on a Boeing 787-9 between New York and Santiago.
It will cost you 82,500 American Airlines (and $45.50 in taxes) to fly this Business Class one way.
The Award Space
Finding It
You won’t find LATAM award space on aa.com. Search on ba.com instead. You should be able to see the award space on qantas.com, but for whatever reason it’s not showing up, which is a shame because Qantas has an award calendar versus ba.com where you have to search day by day. I called AAdvantage to double check that the space I was seeing on ba.com wasn’t phantom–and it wasn’t. So you’ll have to check day by day on ba.com unfortunately.
The Calendars
I used Award Nexus to generate award space calendars in order to show you guys just how much space is open on LATAM’s new direct flight to Australia.
Santiago > Melbourne
The maximum amount of award seats you can search for at one time on Award Nexus is four, but ba.com shows seven seats available every day the route runs (Thursday, Saturday, Monday) in October and November.
Here is the calendar for four travelers in October:
The calendar for four travelers in Novembers is the same.
Melbourne > Santiago
Ba.com also shows seven seats available every day the route runs in the other direction (Friday, Sunday, Tuesday) in October and November.
Here is the calendar for four travelers in October:
The calendar for four travelers in November is the same.
Luckily October and November are great months to visit Australia, as that is spring in the Southern Hemisphere.
Getting the Miles
While this new route doesn’t originate in the United States, it could be a great addition to an extended trip. And it’s easy to earn a lot of American Airlines miles right now.
For a limited time, the Citi /AAdvantage Platinum Select MasterCard and the CitiBusiness / AAdvantage Platinum Select World MasterCard are both offering 50k bonus miles for spending $3,000 on each card within three months of opening it. The new Barclaycard AAdvantage Aviator Red World Elite MasterCard is offering 40k bonus American Airlines miles after just one purchase and paying the annual fee of $95. You can sign up for all three in the same nine day period (you can be approved for no more than one Citi card in an eight day period) and earn at least 146k American Airlines miles within three months after meeting the bonus requirements.
If you are looking for ways to earn American Airlines miles specifically for this award, the sign up bonus of one of the Citi AAdvantage cards + the Barclaycard AAdvantage card would be enough to book.
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Bottom Line
LATAM begins a new (and their only) non-stop route to Australia, between Santiago, Chile and Melbourne, this coming October. There are seven award seats available in both directions in October and November.
It would cost 82,500 American Airlines miles and $42.50 out of pocket for taxes to fly this route.
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