Originally Posted by
slack455
This isn't for intra south-america flights, but I've seen some weird behavior with LAN awards through OW partners. LAX-LIM for example will never show more than 1 available seat, BUT make that SFO-LIM and as long as there is AA saaver availability for the SFO-LAX leg you'll get 2+ seats available on the same LAX-LIM flight that showed only 1 seat. I noticed similar oddities with MIA/MCO. I've tried calling AA/BA to see what the agent can get and they as well can only see that single seat for booking LAX-LIM
I'm not sure if this is the cause in the specific situation, but there are such things as "married" segments, where availability existing only a combination of flights but not on the individual segments as stand-alone flights, because the airline is interested in promoting travel from A to C (whether via B or not), but does not need to promote travel from A to B or B to C.
But, OTOH, there sometimes is a glitch in airline award searches where if you search A-B-C, and A-B has 3 seats but B-C has 1 (or 0!) seats, if you search as A-B-C, it'll claim 3 seats, but 2 (or all 3!) of those are "phantom" on B-C, and you only get the true award availability results by checking each segment individually.
So it depends on which of these two situations is going on as to whether 3 seats
really are available SFO-LAX-LIM or not.