When I was in Santiago de Chile I booked a couple of tours to get me out of the city a bit. Something that has changed a lot since I last went on tours is that they 100% expect you to be contactable on WhatsApp. This sort of makes sense: tourists are not using local numbers any longer, since travel ESIMs are providing a better solution, but they're data only, so you need to do your phone calls over data, and Signal, Telegram or whatever else sadly just don't have the mind share of WhatsApp.
Of course I've had a data-based life for years. Even the answer message on my phone tells you to send me an e-mail (if I haven't managed to disable the feature altogether - by far the favoured alternative). Even if I do need to talk to people, all the people I want to chat with are on Signal, so that's what I've been using and it works very well. For the travel, though, I figured to bite the bullet and I should have a WhatsApp account so I set one up a few weeks ago in preparation for the trip. When I got stuck in Melbourne for the night I used it to contact my neice there, and that worked just fine.
On arrival in Chile, a tour provider asked me to send them a WhatsApp message so they could send me pick-up details, and the moment I sent them that, my shiny new WhatsApp goes into "Account Review" status. This completely sucks because five minutes later they send me the pick-up details and I can't access them. Eight hours later my account unlocks, and I can sign in and see that I was sent a message, but end-to-end encryption was enabled and I can only know there was a message, not what that message was.
I asked them to resend, which triggered Account Review again and then I had no chance of going on that tour.
Around the end of the day the account unlocks again, and I got to see all of their attempts to contact me, for about two minutes before it went into account review again.
What's wrong here? Is it a bad pattern that all of my contacts are tour operators? Apparently it's some kind of AI model ("Artificial Stupid") that makes these decisions, but when the Account Review says "this is fine" it's like that has no weight in the decision to go into Account Review again the moment I try to look at messages.
Frustratingly I was forced to decide that it was just too flaky to be able to trust it, so I cancelled my next tour which was also going to do this same pick-up arrangement.
Moving on to San Pedro de Atacama this week, it worked for a couple of days, until I go on a tour and then suddenly: ¡BAM! Account Review again., And again. And again. I was more fortunate this time in that I was able to front up directly at the offices of the people I'd booked the tours with, and they were able to e-mail me instead (or in one exceptional case turn up at my hotel room) to tell me my tour would not be departing at 4:30am the next morning due to excessive snow.
I can't depend on above & beyond from the tour people, and of course when you book a tour you're pretty regularly at one remove from the people who run it, and probably another remove away from the tour guide coordinating the pick-up at 4:30 in the morning.
It turns out this was the pattern for the whole trip. There were a number of tour providers that I managed to connect to on WhatsApp, but whenever there was anything time-critical: BAM!!! Account Review! and eighht hours later I would get to see it.
I gave up, after a few weeks (I wish I'd given up earlier) and just told the tour providers that WhatsApp was broken for me, and could they just use e-mail, which worked (and continues to work) just fine.
Warts and all, it seems that the 1970's killer app for the internet is still around, fifty years later.