LGACIC

I was hoping to look into the $8 anniversary grabaseat fares this morning, but am repeatedly getting a broken link. Has anyone managed to book?

Kamadan

The site has been down since just before 9am, and at that time before it went dark, was showing approximately 11k+ people logged in.

From AirNZ Grab-a-Seat's Twitter account: https://twitter.com/grabaseat/status/489878631426973696

smeags_nz

I saw 23,000 people online, just before the site stopped working.

jeremykjtan

The site is back up and running again now. grabaseat announced that they couldn't meet demand and seats for the sale fares are going to now be released periodically throughout the day.

Looking at the fares that have already gone live, seats are VERY limited (6-12 seats) and appear to be midweek flights (two consecutive mid week days) in the first week or two of August..

Happy grabbing all!

sbiddle

Ironically it was super easy to book seats while the site was down, I'm surprised it took a couple of hours for all the $8 ones to go. As the destinations and dates are all listed on the twitter account you only had to go to the Air NZ site to book one.

It's a shame they're all the week I head off to the US. :-(

Kamadan

That was true for the morning batch during the "outage" from 9am to around 11am as the deals were published on Twitter, and you can't access Grabaseat.co.nz site.

However, once they manage to bring the site back online and "stable" (even with 12k-16k users logged in), the twitter announcement was timed within 10 seconds of the respective deals going live on Grabaseat.co.nz, and by then most have been snapped up (I was refreshing and monitoring it during work today... too many boring pointless meetings).

It was a cute little promotion while it lasted. Almost all flights are mid-week, and being based in Auckland, completely useless for me to do any day trips as most of the regional flights originated from the towns in the morning (instead of the other way round).

Antonio8069

I receive these offers daily and they are quite predictable. Does ANZ ever offer seats to the Chatham Islands? Tonga?

Also, as grabaseat is so prolific, does anyone actually pay ANZ's regular fares?

DomesticGoddess

Auckland-Tonga flights were available on Grabaseat on Friday, priced at (from memory) $119.

Air NZ don't fly to the Chatham Islands. For flights there you'll need to look at http://www.airchathams.co.nz

Grabaseat fares are only sold on selected routes on limited days. They're great if you don't mind where you go in a couple of weekends time, or you want to go to (for example) Rotorua in the next couple of months. Less good if you need to be somewhere on a particular date, and you require certainty.

cavemanzk

NZ always sales every week for short-haul Intentional, as the fares don't include bags/meals on base levels. it helps them to be able to offer rock bottom fares, that allow them to dominate over the LCC on the Tasman.

e.g its pretty essay to do a weekend in SYD/MEL from Auckland fro $350 return (including taxes). Generally these deals are 4-12 weeks out from departure, where as other times booking a short notice you can pay $450 oneway on an Seat Only fare.

SpannerSpinner

Since this topic has popped to the top I'll ask here.

I've been on and off watching the reverse auctions on a tuesday, and they don't seem to sell many fares that way, if indeed each auction does represent one (set of) fares. The available fares seem reasonably priced just before they hit reserve (usually 40-60% of the current retail price for the fare)

Why are these auctions not more popular? Is the inflexible dates? Or just low awareness of the auctions?