Interesting you note that, because we did much the same last year and had no problems. And boy did we have baggage coming back from AKL: 6 bags, 2 oversize, mostly full of your country's fine agricultural products (I'm a textile artist.)

Now it was a very different story on the AirNZ-ticketed one way getting us back from ZQN. As a strictly UA flyer I was unclear how that worked and unpleasantly surprised, but it appeared to be the correct outcome.

I'm not aware of different rules for differently-geographied parties? (Or perhaps something changed since 18 months.) At any rate it is indeed maddening, and confounds my attempts to bring home goodies from various locations.