Booking miles flights with alliance partners NOT via London

Was trying to look up potential reward flights from NYC to Madrid, and nothing at all shows up.
My wife thinks you cannot book reward flights with partners that do not have one leg in their home country anymore. Is this correct?
Online sure draws a blank, but we all know that's unreliable - call a human in Swansea?

I've done it before - Air France flights from West Africa to Paris, Biz class, using VS miles, totally online, but... not anymore, it seems?

Reward tickets with partners are limited and AF/Delta do not release that many to begin with.
I know with AF, they have a very small bucket of tickets which they give to Virgin.
I have seen JFK-Madrid with Delta but that was for December just gone but in Economy with Delta.
I hardly see Delta One reward seats available on any route.

It is doable and no, you don’t need to do a leg in home country, but with the new website; it’s becoming more difficult to find partner seats.

Best bet is to call Virgin and hopefully get through to Swansea team and if you’re flexible in dates, it’s worth a shot

It

Thanks.

My issue is when you are just trying to get the 'lay of the land' - to see what the options/ dates/ costs are?
No reason to bother Swansea/ in person for that, but... they give you no other option anymore.

Searching for partner flights seems to have gone backwards from a few years ago, at least imho!

The via London part is wrong for sure. I’ve booked AF/KLM returns from MAN into Europe no problem. Partners do have limited availability though.

Thanks all - any workarounds for random checking of other carriers reward flights online, like... via another carrier's website maybe - Delta/AF/KLM etc? I would rather not bother the call center for a broad brush first look at summer/ autumn availability.

An elderly aunt fractured her leg in Africa and needed it fixing with a specialist in Paris, due to childhood polio.
Air France would carry her as injured pax, if in Business. I got her a one-way AF biz ticket for ~50k VS miles and $300-ish fees, all online. Never spoke to anyone. That was in 2022, and seems no longer possible, which is the opposite of progress!

FYI - I did find some Business Class tickets on points with AF.
IAD-CDG direct or for me with also connection to GVA. No stop in UK. Took some searching. Limited availability.
Seems as flexible calendar is no more it will take a lot of manual searching.
Most likely website has changed to make it also harder to find, to get more people booking VS flights