NZ056
AKL-NAN
After another night at the Novotel, where we repacked our things, and visited freinds in town, the next day started with check in at the premium lounge in AKL airport. I don't want to come out as too "smug" after the ZQN incident, but I must say we were quickly reminded that Premium is a very strange word in Air New Zealand's vocabulary. Indeed Premium there means Premium machines (which are the same than other machines)... Go figure..!
After scanning our passports, the beautiful premium machine could not check us in and recommended to find an agent (sighs), which we did. The agent printed our boarding cards, our tags, her colleague attached priority labels to the tags, as according to him he was bored of doing nothing. If that's true why on earth to NZ put machines to replace bored agents???
He then escorted us to a baggage drop counter where our luggages were sent away, and told us to we were all set.
We then proceeded towards the common line for immigration, where there were no priority line for C passengers and where after 10 minutes queueing we learned from the agent we had to fill in a pink form. Big mess as apparently that morning; no one knew about it! One must say that contrary to USA where sometimes you are over informed in airports, in AKL, there are no indication realted to that form at all in queue, and our check in agents did not mention it either. Very premium indeed, these two...
Premium international check in in AKL
Premium it is
Premium machines
International Koru Club AKL
That done we headed for the Koru Club which again is quite a big lounge. I really like the many different types of seating areas. The breakfast buffet was quite alright with a selection of breads and pastries, cereals, warm pancakes, quiche and bean stew. There is of course a Barrista, for decent coffee.
Entrance
Seating area
Kid free zone
More seating areas
Breakfast spread
In this Koru club as well the choice of newspaper and magazines was also limited, no matter with free Internet that worked rather well, one can check all the news.
I will not mind coming back to this lounge in a few things; it's a rather nice place to be for a few transit hours.