Updated details:
Flight: We bought consolidator tickets on LAN Chile for $604 per person, round-trip JFK to Santiago. I bought them from abstravel.com and paid a $30 per ticket service charge. I was very pleased with LAN Chile and will gladly fly with them again in the future. I far preferred them to Aerolineas Argentinas.
Hotel: Again, we loved the Hotel Posada de Farellones, located near the ski resorts up in the Andes. The food was not quite as good as was served last year, but was still good, on the whole. The biggest change was the addition of a big jacuzzi, which is wonderful after a day of skiing. The staff is so very nice, and I really appreciated how nicely the hotel is maintained.
The resorts: The snow was much better this year, with excellent conditions at La Parva, generally very good conditions at Valle Nevado, and mixed conditions at El Colorado. We ended up liking La Parva best because of the variety of terrain, snow conditions, and the lack of crowds. Instead of paying for transportation from the hotel to Valle Nevado, we bought combined La Parva/Valle Nevado tickets on two days and used the interconnecting trails to ski to Valle Nevado: if you're an intermediate skiier, it's fairly easy to do.
The road: I got a clearer understanding about the mountain road rules. The road from Santiago up to the resorts has directional rules that apply only on the weekends. I think the road is up only from 8 AM to 2 PM and down only from 4 PM to 8 PM. So I would make sure to arrive and leave on a weekday. I had the hotel arrange airport transfers, $80 each way.
Santiago: If you go to Santiago, definitely climb Cerro Santa Lucia, a beautiful city park with a marvelous view of the city. We also took the subway, which was nice and easy to navigate.
Entry and exit: Because my passport still had last year's $100 entrance fee receipt stapled onto it, I didn't have to pay the $100 again, but I had to pay for my kids, who had new passports. Mysteriously, LAN did not charge us the $26 per person "airport tax" that Aerolineas Argentinas had charged us the year before.
