This article was entirely unrepresentative of my own experiences in Brazil. From reading others' comments as well, I'd conclude the writer just has bad luck, or there was something big happening where and when she was visiting.

I got married back in October, and we spent our two-week honeymoon in Brazil. It COULD have been a travel nightmare because we packed in a lot of different destinations: (1) Chicago to Miami [on TAM's partner American] to Sao Paulo to Curitiba to Florianapolis; (2) Florianapolis to Curitiba to Brazilia to Manaus; (3) Manaus to Sao Paulo direct; (4) Sao Paulo back to Miami to Chicago, but we only had one bad flight experience, when my luggage was lost for about an hour the last time we flew into Sao Paulo. All of our seven (7) flights on TAM were within five minutes of on time - I was very impressed.

I loved the comparatively lesser hassle of Brazilian security. I think it would have been easy to wander on to the wrong plane, but I LOVED that we didn't have to arrive two hours before the scheduled departure time to have all of stuff x-rayed. I found that liberating.

I also thought the flight attendants were extremely helpful to a couple like us who spoke really no Portugeuse. I found it a little odd that ALL of the people behind the counter for every airline in every airport we landed in were women, but maybe that's a cultural thing.

Also - the writer didn't mention much about the planes themselves. Compared to planes in the U.S., I thought TAM's were uniformly newer, cleaner and more spacious. I also appreciated the free cachaca we enjoyed on more than one long flight.

If I ever go back to Brazil (or, hopefully, when I go back there), I won't hestitate to book on TAM (although one writer's point about their recent merger with what used to be VARIG may be well taken).