We love South America and find LAN a good airline in the air but terrible on the ground. We are soon to take another trip and I cannot select the preferential seats we are entitled to as Emerald OW pax. We are on a QF ticket but the internal SA flights are all on LAN. The LAN website invites you choose the preferential seats and makes a point about them being for OW emerald pax, but once selected, the online system just spins round and never completes the process. When you call them (terrible experience) they tell you that these preferential seats can only be selected online and they are not authorised to do it. Fine, but useless if the website doesn't work. Their next option is tell you to wait until check in, by which time these seats are gone. There never seems to be a supervisor available to speak to. I will see if QF can do it but they seem to hit the same barriers with LAN.
This is not a new problem. We've taken at least 20 LAN flights in the last 5 years and I have rarely been able to select seats (preferential or otherwise) on line and not all in the last couple of years. Most flights have been J so LAN have been OK to do it over the phone. However, it seems almost impossible to get preferential seats for Y flights online. On a few occasions, they have done it over the phone, but typically they just say no, and sometimes just hang up on you. I could write pages on the terrible experiences we've had on the ground with LAN - lack of communication about changed/cancelled flights, changing seats with no advice to last row of economy and/or not together, refusal to recognise OW emerald status, declining to allow my husband and I to have seats together when one on QF ticket and on LAN ticket, etc. However, once one gets around these extraordinary hurdles, in the air they have been consistently good.