Originally Posted by
kyanar
I don't think IAH is a corner case tbh. A lot of the Australian economy is the oil and gas exploration sector, and Southern Texas really is the O&G capital. I think you'll find a significant percentage of every flight to IAH is populated with transfers from ex-Aus flights, usually employees and partners of BHP/Chevron/BP and the like.
Let's survey all Australians who fly, and see how many of them want to regularly fly to IAH.
Very,
very few.
For those very,
very few, Air NZ is a good program, since they are forced to fly it regularly for work purposes to go to IAH, so might as well signup.
For every single other Australian who doesn't want to fly a route that Air NZ flies to exclusively... the program is a bad one for them.
It may be a surprisingly large amount of Australian business travel that wants to go to IAH. But that is easily the minority of general Australian travel. Even business travel to/from the USA. It's one single location.
Yes it is a corner case. The question being asked was is it a good program for Australians in general. Unless you have some reason to be flying Air NZ because it's the most direct route to a specific Star Alliance hub you need to be flying into like IAH, the answer is no.