40K Points For 8 Hours In Business? A Great LATAM Redemption!

Intro

Yesterday, I was browsing around while booking a trip to Ecuador and came across a decently good redemption opportunity for later this month. While LATAM has been notoriously stingy about releasing business class awards, especially on their 767s, if you are flexible, you might have some luck!

The Redemption

Getting down to South America can be expensive in business on points these days, with AA not releasing a lot of saver awards to other OW members, United charging 80K (mainly to Brazil, which you now need a visa for), and Delta being Delta.

However, there is LATAM, the largest carrier in South America, which has some pretty good redemptions through Virgin Atlantic. For 40K Chase Points (transferred over with a 25% bonus), I booked the following in business class:

LA2691: New York (JFK)-Lima (LIM) LATAM 767- 300ER Business Class

I have previously reviewed their 787 twice, which you can check out here!

While good on paper as a redemption, there are two things that makes this even better:

1. Taxes only came out to about 54$, which isn't bad at all.

2. This ticket will give me access to the Delta One Lounge in New York, which is perhaps the best business class lounge in the United States.

   
   

Cannot wait to head back and have another wagyu, or two, or three...

So in the grand scheme of things, I figure this to be a terrific redemption down to South America, especially after Alaska isn't releasing many saver awards for LATAM anymore...

Just note: Virgin also doesn't release a lot of saver space, so you do have to play around with it and be a little flexible.

Final Thoughts

If you are thinking about heading down to South America and have a stash of Chase or American Express points, it might be worth a look at LATAM Business Class, booking through Virgin Atlantic. For 50K points (with decent transfer bonuses), it's one of the better redemption down south at the moment.