Right, this is an impossibly aviation geeky thing to have noticed, but I see that Air New Zealand are dropping the Zeal prefixes on trans-Tasman (and presumably Pacific, I haven't checked) flights from the end of October. The 7xx's have been replaced with 1xx's, and the 8xx's with 2xx's. So there is no longer a quick way to differentiate between say the 1 pm departure to Sydney being an A320 (NZ719) or a bigger plane (NZ119) - they are all NZ119 now. There also seem to be a couple of upgrades to frequency for certain Aussie departures, including a nicely timed morning departure to Sydney on certain days (NZ117).

The exception seems to be flights to the Gold Coast, which retain NZ9xx designation and are still marked as "operated by Zeal 320". If it hadn't been for this I would have assumed that Air NZ were reabsorbing the Zeal operation back into the mainline. But it seems pretty pointless to do this if there is a carve out for the Gold Coast. Anyone know what is happening?