Hi everyone, I fly primarily with Star Alliance airlines so please excuse me if I this is a newbie question. I need to get from Singapore to Santiago, Chile. The best route (ie. just 2 flights) is to fly to either Auckland or Sydney and then take a direct flight.

Since I have spare credit card points, I wanted to convert some to Asia Miles to redeem a Qantas return flight for the AKL/SYD-SCL leg. The travel dates are 10 months away but already it seems impossible to get such a redemption flight. I've tried +/5 days and oneworld is saying there are no redemption flights available. This is true for Economy, Biz and First Class. Pretty frustrating and surprising to me because I've never had problems getting the redemption flights I want on *A and my travel dates are 10 months away...

So my question is, is it typically this hard to redeem points on oneworld or am I missing something? Are there any tricks to help increase the chances of getting redemption flights? (other than being an Emerald)

And in case anyone's wondering, no I haven't converted my CC points to Asia Miles yet. Worst case scenario is to fly SQ to Barcelone then Sao Paolo then on to SCL but would really want to avoid that itin.

Thanks in advance for any insights anyone can offer!