Travel agents are unable to evaluate the safety and soundness of something so complicated as an airplane. A travel agent's testimony to the favorability of a domestic airline with the highest market share is suspect.
Two weeks ago, perhaps 100,000 people in Buenos Aires were without electricity. Show me one piece of complex infrastructure in this city that is well-maintained and I will step onto an AA airplane.
Do with it what you will. I think it’s rather obvious that a travel agent makes no claim whatsoever to having inspected a plane. That said, industry-wide Aerolineas enjoys a solid reputation for safety. I can also personally attest to having less problems with them with delays and the like than with any other domestic airline.
That they enjoy the highest domestic share is utterly irrelevant to that, and may have
something more to do with their serving an order of magnitude more routes than any other airline in the domestic market. There is no route I know of that another airline flies more (or as) frequently than they do, and there are tons of routes that only they serve. What does that have to do with my assessment of their safety record?!
That several clients of mine who are seasoned flyers will not use any other airline - very specifically including LAN (now LATAM) is again a fact, do with it what you will. They are more punctual than any other airline. They are less fussy about carry-on baggage. Etc.
I’ve never heard of a direct flight from Salta to BsAs make an unscheduled stop in Tucumán to pick up passengers, as a relative had happen with LATAM a couple years back.
Just in the last weeks, I’ve had to deal with:
- an Andes flight being delayed by about 10 hours (by no means an isolated incident);
- a LATAM flight in which the passengers arrived at the airport on time only to learn that the flight had been oversold and that they were being rebooked for the next day’s flight, and that it was their fault for not having checked in online earlier (I got it resolved, don’t even ask how);
- a booking with Norwegian in which passengers going from Bariloche to Iguazú on a single ticket with a 4h stop in BsAs had to collect and recheck their baggage in AEP, just because;
- etc. I don’t have any Flybondi stories because I emphatically recommend passengers not fly them, based just on published incidents.
Nothing of the sort with Aerolineas in any comparable time frame.
Me personally? When I came here I definitely adhered to “it’s Argentine ergo it must be crap” mentality as much as anyone else here. Over time of working in the business, and observing several of my clients, including business class passengers, who thought nothing of, say, adding a few hundred dollars per ticket to travel at the time they preferred, making very clear that they don't prefer American to Aerolineas (and on the contrary), I started to moderate my own biases. A year and a half ago I took the plunge and went with my family to NY with Aerolineas for the first time, mainly for the cuotas sin interes. I was very favorably impressed, the plane was newer than American’s, the staff an order of magnitude friendlier (we travel with children, and that is where the difference in attitude is most noticeable).
