Will much change when LATAM leaves oneworld?

The Flight Detective
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Thanks to Delta and LATAM entering a partnership, the South American airline will leave the oneworld alliance. The final day for membership will be 30 April 2020 and LATAM leaves oneworld on 1 May 2020.

Anyone seeing this would automatically think that’s it. No more frequent flyer miles or recognition, goodbye reciprocal lounge access and all the rest of it. However, that may not be the case.

LATAM Leaves Oneworld

The press release issued by oneworld is quite specific in stating benefits will be offered up to and including 30 April 2020. After that is an interesting line which is wholly non-committal.

It states that “A number of oneworld member airlines plan to maintain frequent flyer agreements with LATAM after 30 April”. Alas, it doesn’t go into specifics and says to contact your airline specifically.

However, when LATAM leaves oneworld, apparently frequent flyer relationships will remain with every single airline currently in the alliance with the exception of American Airlines.

The Points Guy specifically notes that LATAM said that reciprocal lounge access, elite loyalty benefits and the ability to earn and redeem frequent flyer points will remain.

But For How Long?

Qantas have a note on their web site already, which states that frequent flyers will have all benefits up until 30 September 2020. From 1 October, people will earn frequent flyer points but no status credits. This was the original leaving date for LATAM before it was brought forward.

Other airlines like Cathay Pacific, British Airways, Finnair (who still list LATAM as LAN and TAM!), Malaysia Airlines, Iberia, and Japan Airlines mention nothing. Qatar Airways note they will offer benefits up to 30 April 2020 and “Qatar Airways is involved in ongoing discussions with LATAM Airlines Group on how the two airlines can continue to work together to benefit our passengers post LATAM’s exit from oneworld”.

Overall Thoughts

While it clearly sucks to be an American Airlines AAdvantage member in this instance, it looks like all the rest of us are going to be okay when LATAM leaves oneworld. At least for the time being, anyway!

From what I can gather it is too early at this point for all the other airlines to announce anything. We will need to wait and see just how close the relationships going forward will be. However, let’s hope reciprocal lounge access and the ability to earn status will remain.

What do you think will happen when LATAM leaves oneworld? Is there a best and worst case scenario? Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.

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6 comments
    1. Well that would certainly be interesting! Personally I’m hoping for the oneworld links to continue. It’s going to be interesting seeing what happens! Thanks for the comment!

  1. As a Latam elite (Gold) my Oneworld status (Ruby) will cease to work and this means no longer benefits in AA (at least). But I wonder if I’ll have similar benefits in Delta (sadly not in SkyTeam it looks)

    1. I imagine you will have benefits with Delta, for sure. I would be quite surprised if you didn’t really… considering you’re losing one thing, you’d hope to gain something else in return. Time will tell! Thanks for the comment!

  2. I have no doubt that this will be a net win for flyers. The LATAM/AA deal was incredibly anti-competitive and restricted capacity, eliminating lots of direct flights and forcing flyers to go through GRU, even when it was out of the way. Now AA will have to compete with a reinvigorated LATAM route network through Atlanta and JFK, and force AA to restart flights to Brazilian cities other than GRU and GIG, and year round service to GIG from JFK so as not to lose business travelers to DL/Latam.

    1. It will be interesting to see how it all shakes out and what American decide to do to compete properly. Nice to see the anti-competition regulators doing their jobs correctly too. Hopefully the current oneworld links will remain to a large degree. Personally I hope the ability to earn status remains for my programme. Thanks very much for the comment!

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