Originally Posted by
beofotch
We got through security just fine and headed towards the lounge. The lounge agent looked at our Sydney to Auckland boarding passes and said we would have to go to the transfers desk to get new boarding passes. It turns out the boarding passes issued by Thai or other airlines don't scan correctly on the Air New Zealand Barcode scanners. We had passed the transfers desk just as we left security and I thought it was a bit strange we would have to go back there. I asked the agent if they could just re-issue our boarding passes in the lounge. She said they couldn't. I found this hard to believe but there was no point in arguing with the person of authority in the situation so we went to the transfer counter. When we got to the transfer counter, we were dismayed to see the line was 20+ passengers deep with only one Air New Zealand agent working. We waited for a few minutes, and the line hadn't even moved at all. This was ridiculous.
The person in the lounge gave you the wrong reason about the boarding passes, NZ has a strict policy note to accept other airlines boarding passes. This is down to the fact that NZ government fines airlines, they have passengers arriving in New Zealand, with incorrect paperwork. Therefore they chose to have staff re-check what other airlines have entered into the system. They removed the boarding pass printer from the lounge a couple of years back, as SYD airport was ripping them off.