What frequent flyer program to book flights to South America

[Gogo65]

I just have a question in regards to options to use points to get to South America. Preferably Santiago, BA or Rio from Sydney.
i have points in Amex, Qantas, and avianca life miles, so have a few options
i know Qantas fly to Santiago and that seems the most obvious, however looking to see if I could use my Amex or lifemiles points if possible.
i have also looked at transferring to AIr New Zealand but of course that's a lot points!!
is there any more options I'm missing??
thanks for your help
Gogo

 

[Mattg]

What class of travel are you looking to fly in?

Air NZ don't release J award seats, and their Airpoints program is pretty terrible anyway. So don't send your points there! But you may be able to find a Y seat on the AKL-EZE route using LifeMiles.

I think that realistically your choices in J are QF or LA metal to Santiago (with the potential for onwards connections on LA or JJ). So you will want to use QF or another oneworld program. The cheapest J redemption would probably be with AA miles. The price would be 100,000 miles for J return (until the 22 March 2016 increase, anyway). But from Amex you would need to transfer the points to SPG and then AA. I think in total you would need to transfer 160,000 Amex points to SPG to eventually get 100K AA miles.

Perhaps a better options is Asia Miles. 120,000 miles for SYD-SCL J return and Amex transfers there 1:1. The disadvantage of using AsiaMiles over AA though is that the fuel surcharge will be higher and you'll probably have to pay more to continue onto Buenos Aires or Rio on the same ticket from Santiago as it will probably take the booking over into the next zone. With AA, Australia to South America is a fixed price regardless of origin/destination.

Also available is Premium economy return on QF metal for 72,000 miles using Asia Miles. A very good deal and only slightly more expensive than economy.

Failing all that LifeMiles can probably be used for a J award, but you would almost certainly have to route via North America.

Award availability will probably be an issue whichever way you try to go. Most importantly, just make sure that you have found a suitable award seat/s before transferring any miles.

 

[Gogo65]

Thank you Mattg for your very helpful post.
i could buy AA miles with the current promotion, which may be better than transferring through SPG?
does AA load there flights for Qantas and Lan at the same time? Or am I best trying to book directly with Qantas if available flights are offered through QF first?

 

[Mattg]

Thank you Mattg for your very helpful post.
i could buy AA miles with the current promotion, which may be better than transferring through SPG?
does AA load there flights for Qantas and Lan at the same time? Or am I best trying to book directly with Qantas if available flights are offered through QF first?

I'd imagine they would both be loaded initially by AA around 330 days out, but you can't book LAN flights online using AA miles (you'd have to call).

As QF release its own seats to its own members around 353 days out, they are often gone by the time AA members have access to them.

If you do want to use AA miles, make sure you've found a suitable flight first, then put it on hold while you buy or transfer the miles. I'd hate for you to end up with a bunch of AA miles that you can't use.

 

[puppysparkes]

I just have a question in regards to options to use points to get to South America. Preferably Santiago, BA or Rio from Sydney.
i have points in Amex, Qantas, and avianca life miles, so have a few options
i know Qantas fly to Santiago and that seems the most obvious, however looking to see if I could use my Amex or lifemiles points if possible.
i have also looked at transferring to AIr New Zealand but of course that's a lot points!!
is there any more options I'm missing??
thanks for your help
Gogo

What about SYD-DXB-GIG on EK? I know it is longer but if you jag an F award on an A380 it wouldn't be so bad.