Originally Posted by
Nightowl888
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
That's excellent advice - I'll bear that in mind for next time.
Originally Posted by
Thai-Kiwi
Did you look at booking using the multi-city tool to provide the connection time you wanted?
No, I'd never thought of that (silly me). For some reason I thought multi-city was just for ex-NZ international flights only.