Santiago

Well, Santiago was never expected to be anything earth-shattering. It's huge city, mostly pretty normal. It offers lots of museums and giant hill in the city with some great views. We only had 2 days so we kept it really chill, spending most of our time in the apartment relaxing, and we visited San Cristobal Hill.

What was supposed to be the highlight of our time in the area, and one of the highlights of the trip turned in to the lowest point either of us have had on any of our travels.

We had planned to visit Easter Island, Santiago is the only city in the world that offers flights there.

We were met with delays, incredibly rude airport staff, and ended up being denied our flight the morning we were supposed to leave.

We are both very experienced travellers and are shocked and appalled at the treatment we received at the airport that day. We were told we'd need to take a PCR test before we could board our flight, which was news to us but not a major problem. We had 90 minutes to departure by the time we got to the desk and dealt with the agents, but she told us we only had 10 minutes to be back with our test before the closed the check in and that the test would take 20.

Fair enough that we could have been earlier to the airport (we were the 2 hours early, as is the standard). We were back to the desk an hour before departure with all of our documents, baggage tags, permissions to the island, and negative tests and were told that we were too late and wouldn't be allowed on.

As a last ditch we tried to go through security but they wouldn't accept my emailed boarding pass, the said we needed one from the desk.

Everything had to go wrong for this to happen, and never in any of our travels have we had so much resistance from airport staff. They fought us at every turn, put absolutely ZERO effort in to helping us. At the end of the day it's our responsibility, but I'd say sometimes things happen, especially travelling for this long, and it would have been nice to get some help that morning.

We were absolutely devastated of course. We fought for a refund to no avail, and decided to try to take company credit and flew to Argentina.

We will make it there one day, unfortunately it wasn't in the cards for us this time. Hoping for better luck in Argentina!Read more