As previously stated, the flight to Rapa Nui is a new thing. We were scheduled on just the third flight since flights have resumed. With that knowledge, we expected a few hiccups in the process. If you follow any major travel blogs like The Points Guy or View From the Wing etc., they will tell you to avoid traveling somewhere just after it opens. And I understand their logic. Employees are asked to verify certain new details and paperwork after receiving minimal training. The rules often change with rapidity, and there are often miscommunications between governments. With that being said, this flight was a sort of test in risk management and we felt the pros of being successful outweighed the cons.
We did pay for this flight. . . sort of. I used some credit card points to give us a decent discount, but the main takeaway is that we had confirmed seats. We did this for multiple reasons — one being that we wanted to make sure we got there. Right now, flights are infrequent — only twice a week, scaled back from two flights a day pre-pandemic. As of right now, only two aircraft have landed on Rapa Nui before us, which means there are currently probably fewer than 500 tourists on the island, assuming they all stayed there the entire time. That has a certain appeal. While standby travel might be easier in the future after more flights resume, there will also be more people traveling, fewer rental cars, more expensive hotels etc.
But first — what were all these steps? Oy vey. We hopped in an Uber to the airport which took just 15 minutes. From there, we were bounced from the check-in line over to the sanitarios (health inspection) line. There we provided the agent with our passports, our negative PCR tests, and then had to dig in our phones for the QR code that we used to get into the country. I thought we were done with that days ago, so it took some time to track it down. These were eventually scanned, and we were given some other piece of paper indicating that our documents had been verified.
We returned to the regular check-in line where our passport names were verified against a flight manifest (another reason it may have been good to get confirmed tickets), and we also had to show a government form that showed where we had booked a hotel (reason #3 to have confirmed seats as we often don’t book hotels unless we know we are actually getting somewhere). We were issued another piece of paper and some kind of sticker to show these items were verified. Check-in itself was not that involved, though I think we may have been given some other sort of paper. At one point we were carrying about five to six different documents that were bursting out of our passports whilst other people were bursting with Dunkin Donuts. Apparently these must be a hot commodity on the island. People were carrying boxes and boxes of them. I don’t know how the Dunkin at the airport actually had that many donuts to sell.
Then we got in some sort of passport control line despite us getting on a domestic flight. This was the slowest part, with just one worker processing everyone’s documents. We were given two new pieces of paper! After going through security and walking the entire length of the terminal, we handed in one of these pieces of paper to some guy near the gate. Every step along the way, we were told by the agents that we had to hurry. We were near the end of all the lines to be fair, but we were being rushed unnecessarily. If they wanted things to go faster, they should have hired more people to work the desks or shut down the Dunkin Donuts inside the terminal like civilized people. Everyone outside New England knows Dunkin Donuts are trash.
We boarded without incident, though we discovered there were quite a few open seats — a fact that we found a bit annoying having bought our tickets, but then realized it’s probably payload-optimized (a fancy way to say that cargo is prioritized over passengers). Rapa Nui is after all one of the most isolated airports in the world, so most goods need to be brought in by plane. By the looks of it, boxes of Dunkin Donuts were the thing that Rapa Nui needed most. No exaggeration, we saw at least 15 to 20 dozen donuts in our section of the plane alone (a number which Nicole says is extremely conservative).
To summarize, it was a little bit stressful to deal with all of the airport nonsense and I think we were doing better than most. There were people getting removed from lines, missing documents, difficulty finding the right forms, passport issues for another couple, and even some people on the ground in tears. So that’s that. The flight was fine if we ignore the girls behind us blasting reggaton music and singing along to it. The five and a half hour flight touched down to wild applause. We disembarked behind most, as we were close to the back of the plane. In spite of this, and despite my overwhelming pessimism that it would be at least an hour before we would be out of the airport, we walked by everyone who was waiting at baggage claim, picked up a rental car (which we never received an actual confirmation email for), and were out of the airport in FIVE minutes. We were shocked. With that, the second part of our day commenced — worthy of its own blog post as it was an extremely different experience than the first half of the day.
passports & pepto bismol 