Hi everyone, I hope I have the right subforum here.

My wife and I want to properly use our points to book our honeymoon to Argentina and Brazil. Here's what we're looking at:

I have 92k SPG points, wife about 60k.
I have 89k AAdvantage points
We have 60k Aadvantage points as a wedding gift.

We are flying out of Chicago, planning to fly to Rio, visit Iguazu, go to Buenos Aires, and home from there.

Flying American. I see that I have options of either flying 30k or 60k for the flight down, depending on whether I'm willing to have an extra stop and stretch my first flight to 15.5 hours. We could book a Miami flight and avoid that portion, but I'm not sure how to evaluate whether that's a good idea or not.

Flights back are 60k per person, flying American.

I assume we're better off booking our Brazil > Argentina flight without points, and using cash + points would be the optimum use for hotel stays in Rio, Iguazu, and Buenos Aires.

What should I be looking at in terms of optimizing or otherwise maximizing the use of our points?

Thanks!