When Award Travel Goes Wrong: The Qatar/LATAM Meltdown
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Editorial Disclosure: Opinions expressed here are the author's alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, hotel, airline, or other entity. This content has not been reviewed, approved, or otherwise endorsed by any of the entities included within the post..
Affiliate Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you if you make a purchase through these links. I only recommend products and services I trust and believe will benefit you.
Part of my 10 Days in Peru with Kids series. Catch up on Our Favorite Peru Guides & Operators first.
Every points and miles post makes it look easy. Book the flight, show up, fly home. This is the post about what happens when it isn’t easy, because it happened to us on the very last day of this trip, and I want you to actually know what to do if it happens to you.
The Original Plan
Our way home was supposed to be simple. Cusco to Lima on Sky Airline, then Lima to Miami on Qatar using 13,000 miles, an overnight at the Hyatt House Miami Airport, and a Southwest flight the next morning from Miami to Kansas City. Clean, mostly on points, nothing unusual.
What Actually Happened
Qatar changed our Lima to Miami flight time, from 1:15 PM to 12:15 AM. Which created a huge layover so I booke a hotel room at the airport. Then, three hours before our flight, we went to the airport. At the Lima airport, LATAM agents couldn’t print our boarding passes because Qatar hadn’t issued a new booking number on their end. Our seats still showed as assigned in both the LATAM and Qatar apps, so it looked fine right up until the moment it wasn’t. The next LATAM flight wasn’t until the following night, which meant five of us, my mom, my husband, myself, my daughter, and my son, were looking at being stranded in Lima for a full extra day.
I’m not going to pretend I handled that moment gracefully. I started crying at the counter. Between the exhaustion of ten days of travel and watching our flight home fall apart with no clear fix, it was a lot.
The Fix
I don’t know enough about the LATAM and Qatar side of things to explain exactly why the booking number issue happened. What I do know is that standing there with limited options, I made a call: transfer 120,000 Chase points to United and rebook everyone on the spot. The United agents at the Lima airport were incredible, genuinely so helpful during a stressful moment, and got all five of us on a flight to Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport.
I also have to give credit to a tool, not a partnership, not an affiliate link, just something I pay for myself and am genuinely obsessed with. I’ve had a $10 a month Seats.aero premium subscription for a while now, and it is the reason I was able to search award availability across programs fast enough to find and book that United rerouting within 30 minutes. Standing at an airport counter with a stressed-out family is not the moment to be manually checking five different airline websites one at a time. Without it, I don’t think I could have pulled this off nearly as fast.
From there, we Ubered from Bush to Hobby Airport, and flew Hobby to Kansas City on Southwest using our Companion Passes.
What I’d Tell You
Keep your transfer partners in your head as a real-time backup plan, not just a strategy for booking in advance. I didn’t have time to research anything at that counter, I had to know off the top of my head that Chase points move to United and act on it immediately. That’s the actual value of understanding transfer partners, not just getting a great redemption, but having an escape hatch when a booking falls apart in front of you.
Also, when one airline changes a codeshare or partner-booked flight, don’t assume the other airline in the itinerary automatically knows. Ours didn’t, and that’s what caused the boarding pass problem in the first place.
And I’ll say it plainly: I don’t plan to book with Qatar again. I can’t fully explain the technical breakdown between them and LATAM, but I know how it felt standing at that counter with my family, and that’s not a position I want to be in twice.
If you want the full mechanics of how transfer partners work before your own trip, my award flight positioning guide is a good place to start, and if you’re building toward a Companion Pass of your own the way we did for that last leg home, here’s how to earn the Southwest Companion Pass.
Back to the start: 10 Days in Peru with Kids
Opinions expressed here are the author's alone, not those of any bank, credit card issuer, hotel, airline, or other entity. This content has not been reviewed, approved or otherwise endorsed by any of the entities included within the post.
I found out about points and miles accidentally.
I was researching index funds and happened upon the points and miles community through creators who also post about budgets, financial independence, and investing.
Points and miles allowed those people to travel and work toward financial independence simultaneously.
Thank goodness I got started when I did. The past almost two years of travel have been something we will never forget.
Earning points and miles through credit cards is only a good choice if you have the financial discipline to use them, like cash/debit cards.
Since we started traveling with points and miles, we have had more money going into our investment and savings accounts than ever.
Now I'm excited to teach you!
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