Finding awards to MDE or BOG over the holidays
 

Hey all!

Looking for any tips/tricks or creative ideas to book from Southern Brazil (probably GIG or GRU) to Colombia (MDE or BOG) around the holidays, ideally after Christmas but before New Years.

We are having trouble finding availability this time of year, and when we do the price is steep — 40k miles for OW in economy!

Any ideas (hidden city?) that might help us do better? Have a lot of *A points, mainly UA but also some flexible Chase UR points.

Appreciate the help!

Generally on awards hidden city won't help you much since most award tickets aren't married segment. (I did say most, but have certainly found a few that are... last one I recall was a very weird one, BON-PVG via EWR was available as a C award as married segments but BON-EWR alone was not).

Are you using MileagePlus or some other program? MileagePlus availability in South America is usually best on CM, however if you have access to AV LifeMiles then you can pay a higher rate and get better availability. One other trick that may or may not help is to look at islands that both CM and AV serve, there are a handful. You might be able to force a connection there if the issue is GRU/GIG-PTY is available but PTY-MDE/BOG is not and also GIG/GRU-BOG is not.

With Chase UR, you may as well plan on using United MileagePlus since none of the other *A partners they transfer to will get you any better availability on either CM or AV. Having said that, I assume you're also checking British Airways for LATAM availability, right? LATAM is also a transfer partner for SPG and their upcharge for non-saver availability is quite reasonable.

As I suspect you know, the period between Christmas and New Years is an extremely popular travel period in latin america in general and Colombia in particular. There are really no tricks. Your best hope is to check daily and keep your fingers crossed that something opens up.

How many Avianca points is it? Points are on sale (again) and you can probably buy sufficient points for well less than buying the ticket in cash.

Maybe not ideal as not using the points you already have, but an option that could make a lot of sense if you're resigned to spending the cash anyways.

This is quite well possible. I recently found myself looking for intra-South America tickets and was completely shocked at how expensive most international city pairs are. Having said that, I also searched for Avios and MileagePlus availability and found extremely little (for December 15th, so not really prime holiday season yet). The only way around it was using LATAM Pass KMs or LifeMiles at increased rates. I don't have any way to get Life Miles other than buying them and was too stingy to use my SPG points for LATAM. Ended up finding out that MVD is significantly cheaper to fly out of than EZE so went with that. Certainly look forward to more LCCs getting started in South America to put price pressure on Avianca and LATAM, what they are charging now even for short international flights is highway robbery. Too bad Azure and GOL aren't more outward looking in the region, they seem mostly focused on domestic with very few routes outside Brazil.

Unfortunately, this appears to be the only advice I've been able to apply so far. Tough time of year, I keep hitting the award engines, but so far it's either no availability or a minimum 40k OW.

Any thoughts on Copa or LATAM availability increasing at ~2 weeks out (+ the close in booking fee), or should I cut my losses now and take what I can get?