Who said Kiwis couldn't fly? (Air New Zealand)

Member Name: The Duke

Product:	Air New Zealand
Date:	25/06/08 (172 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great service, reasonable prices, no hidden extras

Disadvantages: Some information could be clearer.

During a recent trip to New Zealand, it was necessary for me to fly between cities on some legs of my little tour. Not that long ago, I would have had a choice of one whole airline, but times have moved on in New Zealand, thankfully.

As the largest and most popular carrier in New Zealand, Air New Zealand was probably the inevitable choice. It was able to offer a better selection of flight times than the competitors and price-wise, while not always the cheapest, was ever only a few dollars different than, say, Pacific Blue.

That did indeed prove to be the case as I aimed more for mid-afternoon flights between cities whereas Pacific Blue seemed to deal with mornings and early evenings only, though as mentioned above, prices were not that different between the airlines. Prices were slightly more expensive than UK equivalents, but only by a few pounds each time.

It was easy enough to find flight times on the Air New Zealand website and the booking process was fairly standard for a domestic carrier. There are several price points for each flight - Smart Saver, Flexi Saver and Flexi. Smart Saver is the cheapest and I used this on all flights. I didn't really see why I would pay more as I got the same treatment as everyone else on all of the flights. I guess the differences were all in the small print about the ability or cost in changing flights.

I was impressed by the email confirmation from Air New Zealand. It was a text-only affair, but came with an A4 Adobe PDF attachment that had all my details on it. As I was printing out a lot of stuff to take with me, it was nice just to have one piece of paper for each flight was the relevant details on it rather than four pages of guff and clauses that I seem to get when printing out EasyJet bookings. Other airlines that sell direct could learn from this! Easyjet, I'm looking at you!

Air New Zealand requires passengers to check in 30 minutes before the scheduled departure of the flight rather than the UK standard of 1 hour.

The one negative point I had with Air New Zealand was that my final flight from Christchurch to Auckland on the day I was returning home was a two legged flight, stopping at Wellington on the way. What should have been a flight of just over an hour ended up being just short of three hours. As a foreigner, I had no concept of flight times between cities so the long flight time didn't set any alarm bells ringing and the website and subsequent email confirmation didn't mention a stopover in Wellington. This would have been a deal breaker for me and I could have gotten an earlier or later flight that was direct. I wanted to minimise disruption in case there were problems checking in to my long haul flight home and as it happens, due to a late passenger in Wellington, the flight was delayed by about 30 minutes. I think the problem here was that the journey was considered to be one continuous flight all the way through. Other flights through Wellington from Christchurch required a change of plane and have different flight numbers and these ARE clearly marked.

Other than that one incident, I had no real complaints about any of my flights with Air New Zealand. The planes were always clean (and looked fairly new). All flights, apart from the short Wellington to Nelson one, were on Airbuses of some description and were more than comfortable. On each flight, the cabin crew would come round and offer refreshments (usually tea, coffee and crisps or nuts) for free, which was unusual to me as I only ever fly bargain basement carriers in the UK where they charge you for blowing your nose.

All flights were on time (apart from that one mentioned above) and all the Airbuses had drop down screens that provided lots of NZ-related trivia which the younger travellers (and me!) seemed really interested in, plus it helped time pass on dull flights.
The staff, (both cabin and ground crew, were excellent and a lot more friendly than their UK counterparts. Part of that was because they (the cabin crew) didn't seem as focussed on selling you stuff, but part of it is that Kiwis are chattier in general.

For the most part, I think I got good value for money from Air New Zealand over the half dozen or so flights and it was nice to book a flight without the airline trying to get the arm in with "preferred passenger boarding" or having to pay for sticking a bag in the hold or any of the other nonsense that's tarnished the UK domestic market in my opinion. It was the way flying should be (and use to be in the UK): relaxed.

Summary: A good choice of carrier when travelling in New Zealand.