Originally Posted by
sbiddle
I simply don't know how you can say "very, very few".
The real world reality is that at present 7 days a week there are approximately 100 connecting Australian passengers on NZ28 - some days it will be more, other days it will be less than that ~30% loading.
Loadings to ORD of Australian passengers are exceeding that 30% figure, on some days quite significantly.
The Americas is a key market for NZ through traffic from Australia and those numbers are significant, and why we've seen increases in the number of widebody 789 and 777 services to and from Australia.
I think we can easily say it is very very few, when you take into account how many Australians travel to the USA every day... and don't go to IAH. Count up all of the flights leaving Australia going to the USA every single day, and you have your numbers. You must also consider how many of that ~30% loading would travel to IAH 2+ a year. Unless you're regularly traveling 2+ times a year, it makes sense to go elsewhere if FFP is the consideration.
So yes it is very much the definition of a corner case. It is a very small percentage of the traffic. I am surprised this is up for debate. You can argue it's a surprisingly large number, sure. But the percentage remains very few. The question was simple: is the Air NZ FFP a good program for them if they have a choice of who to fly with. The answer is very clearly no for most Australians, bar the corner case of the few that travel to IAH multiple times a year. That was the question. The question wasn't do Australians ever need to travel to IAH.