Well after much to and fro with the AA office in Australia they simply outright refused to allow me to pay the NZ$ price with a credit card that has an Australian address.

After a quick ring round of kiwi friends it was detemined that no-one had the spare credit limit on their card that I could use at 6hrs notice (the credit crunch hits home)

So - deciding there was more than one way to skin a cat I decided (and I'm not proud of this ) to become a Kiwi for a few days. Well one of my Amex cards did!! I called the card services centre and changed my address to a NZ address of a friend.

Left it about 20 minutes to make sure change had registered in the system and then called AA back and let them know that my Amex "NZ" card with the required NZ address was now found and I would use that to pay. "Fantastic mr paul4471 we'll get into ticketing stright away". I called back 3hrs later on way to PER airport and asked for an update, CSA said not ticketed but she could see it was being worked on and promised to call back 20mins later. 20mins later she called back and said tickets were now issued.

I'm now in AKL and at least 50% confident that all will be ok when I check in tomorrow moring for my first flight AA7337 from AKL-MEL. Confidence is based on money coming out of credit card account and AA website now shows ticket status as ticketed. Lack of confidence comes from general experience and the fact that I'm booked under the codeshare number.

Thursday will see a call to Amex and me revoking my temporary honorary kiwi status.

Thanks all for the advice and I wonder if this "changing of address" might be a solution to a lot of the other problems that folks have been experiencing. I can see that in future I may be RSA based or even Sth Korea for credit card billing purposes for at least a short period anyway