Rotorua, and the odd route choice
I had quite a bit of time to fill. If the weather had been nicer I'd have walked into town but instead I decided to enjoy the luxury of sitting back, reading and watching the world go by. Or rather, since this is a small airport in the middle of nowhere, watching preparations for the activities welcoming the first flight from Sydney followed by activities for the first departure to Sydney.
While there is a brief pause in my flying, I'll take a moment to explain why the route Rotorua to Sydney is odd.
Rotorua is not a big town. Bigger places in NZ such as Hamilton and Palmerston North have lost their Air NZ trans-tasman flights, while Dunedin which is also bigger than Rotorua has had a significant cut-back in Air NZ trans-tasman flights. Over the past few years, the tasman schedule has been shaken up to the point the current one doesn't resemble that from several years ago.
Air NZ subsidiary Freedom Air was brought back into mainline. Subsequently a number of their routes (all the Hamilton & Palmerston North ones plus some others) have been dropped.
Wellington has had a big reduction in trans-tasman flights.
Even Auckland hasn't been immune with the old FT favourites of short 747 legs long gone, and some routes have had large reductions in frequency and capacity.
At the same time, Jetstar has been growing from Christchurch base and in the past year has taken over a number of Qantas flights out of Auckland as well. Pacific Blue has this year opened regional flights from Hamilton, Queenstown and Dunedin. Emirates has continued their slow increase in capacity with the Sydney flight switching to A380.
I'm rambling, so back to my points. Rotorua is not a big market. Heck even domestic flights have been reduced (Jetstar did not pick up the Qantas flights into Rotorua when they took over flying within NZ). Rotorua is close enough to Auckland that most leisure visitors spending more than a couple of days within NZ can easily visit it. Australian tourists tend to have short stays in NZ so there probably aren't too many currently visiting Rotorua.
Personally I think there is a reason why Air NZ has launched this route. One is to hamper Pacific Blue's Hamilton route. The catchment area for Hamilton includes Tauranga, Rotorua and the Bay of Plenty, southern Waikato, Taupo. Rotorua is less convenient for Hamilton & Tauranga but more conveniently reached for the rest of the catchment. North of Hamilton has easy access to Auckland. If Hamilton is marginal in terms of demand for direct service anyway (Air NZ claims Waikato customers were very price sensitive and so generally went for the cheaper Auckland flights) then the competition could kill the Pacific Blue route before it has a chance to get established, or at least make it much harder work for Pacific Blue.