Originally Posted by
samjaynz
On a related note about domestic/international connections, is there any way to get Air NZ to 'combine' a separate domestic and international ticket if the connection wasn't there at the time of booking. E.g. we are flying to Fiji soon for a holiday. We fly from Chch to Auckland on a Friday afternoon, stay overnight, and fly out on a separately booked ticket the next AM (this is because all of the flights Air NZ offered had very tight connections and very early starts). Obviously if the Friday flight got cancelled we could be SoL (hopefully insurance would cover). Is there anyway to get these flights combined as if I had booked a single ticket and then adjusted the Chch - Auckland flight to leave earlier?
I am WLG based and I quite often fly to AKL in the evening and overnight there before catching an intl flight out of AKL, as like you, I’m not a fan of the early starts. It’s also not uncommon for fog to mean the early WLG-AKL flight is canned, especially in winter, and I (or my employer) am not usually willing to take the risk of missing the international flight (I travel to IUE quite a bit, where there are only 1 or 2 flights a week).
What I do is book a multistop flight, for example WLG-AKL on the evening of the 9th, AKL-IUE on the morning of the 10th and then IUE-AKL-WLG on the 16th.
This way it’s all still on one ticket, so you have some protection. It saved me last year when my WLG-AKL flight was canned (in fact, all flights out of WLG were, thanks fog!), which meant I missed the intl connection out of AKL the next morning. Air NZ was able to rebook me free of charge on the next flight so I was not out of pocket (and even offered to change my return leg if I wanted to push that out).
I know this probably doesn’t help your current situation, but hopefully is useful in the future
