Originally Posted by Shareholder

Please stop your belly-aching. There are lots of people who want to go to EZE and that increases the demand for award seats at the prime travel period of their summer months, our winter. Now you know to book a year in advance to get exactly what you want when there are hundreds of other AE members who are after the same flights. It is the same for revenue seats. AE buys inventory from AC and once the cheap seats are gone, it's into the next category and thus you must pay more AE miles. Had you tried booking a few moths ago when AE announced a new block of a quarter million Classic award seats, then you likely could have got yours at the Classic level...and this is likely another reason for them being gone now, many who wanted to go booked at this time. You've been provided with optional routings using TAM (GRU is served by a 777 so has many more seats on each flight, at certain times of the year EZE is served by 763s or 777s but these flights are shared on the routing via SCL, another factor for the lower-priced award seats being gone.)

And as someone who has flown this route several times this year, the flight is not 7-hours long, it is one of AC's longer ones at 5K+ miles and is about 10-11 hours flying to SCL, 1-1/2 hrs on the ground, then another 2 hrs to EZE. Via Sao Paulo is marginally longer in connecting time, but not much more so....and if you are transiting you likely don't need a Brazilian visa. (Another option for you might be to take the award seats to/from SCL and buy seats either on the same AC flight or a LAN flight to/from EZE for maybe another $150 each.)

As for the 30% premium, this is the maximum case for SEs, 50% if you're an E. That's the benefit of being a regular AC customer over someone who earns AE miles using other means. Though at times, you can find anytime awards at 25%-30% more than the sold out Classics. But you're still talking about AE buying what was once available for $600, paying $1200 when those cheaper seat categories are sold out. That's why you have to pay more AE miles.