thewanderingv

I know this is a well discussed subject, but please, allow me the therapy of a further grumble.

Was looking at reward bookings using Airpoints (we have a few thousand that we need to burn up at some point to beat inflation), and Airpoints has to be the worst form of FF currency by any objective assessment:

1. Want to travel anywhere off the Air NZ grid? You face a $200 booking fee per passenger - $100 to book the Air NZ segment, and $100 to pay for the reward booking. You can book the Air NZ segment separately online to save one of those $100 fees, and the ridiculous reason it makes sense to do that is because (see #2 ):

2. You cannot book SA reward flights on the same itinerary as an Air NZ flight. I was told by the customer service agent that it would not be possible to link itineraries, so you have to pick up your bags and re-check in. If there's a 8 hour transit, and the desks only open 3 hours before your flight? Too bad.

3. Infant traveling? Too bad. You have to first book your separate itineraries, and then call the partner airline directly and hope that they can add an infant ticket to an existing itinerary. You know where this is going: it's a nightmare. Four different calls to the partner airline and we/they still can't find a way to do this.

4. Pricing? Why do they even bother listing the NZ to Europe option on the Rewards pricing matrix. It comes with the caveat: "New Zealand to Europe: Applies only to journeys between New Zealand and Europe where the sectors flown have the same flight number and are on the same through journey - without stopover."

5. Unlike other regular international fares and pricing where there's more availability of domestic add-on flights, domestic seats reserved for rewards bookings that involve another partner airline are extremely limited. So you have to buy a separate add-on at whatever the going rate is.


Put together, this whole thing sucks. What's the point of SA even bothering to have Air NZ be a part of their network when Air NZ seems to do everything in its power to limit interoperability or direct customer use of the network?


Argh.

kyanar

Weirdly enough, the Airline Partner Reward Chart disagrees with this statement. It claims that if your itinerary contains both NZ and *A segments, it's treated as a *A the whole way through, including NZ.

True - the only carrier to actually offer a single flight number from NZ to EU is NZ themselves, so you have to combine an NZ to Asia or North America and Asia or North America to Europe to achieve this. Or, tack a single *A segment onto the itinerary, and it forces NZ1 to be counted as a partner reward (meaning I/X class must be available. Good luck with that).

Complain to the partner airline about that, not NZ. All *A carriers are stingy about making alliance award seats available, you see the same complaints from UA MP members about NZ or SQ.

keitherson

NZ, out of all *A, is by far the most stingiest. They are downright cheapskates.

Xiaotung

The partner table is completely broken. There is no *A wide Premium Economy redemption and yet on the partner table it show rates in NZ Premium Economy. So this is not an I/X booking class issue. It's simply not possible to book. I have long suspected it is just impossible to book NZ reward and *A reward on the same ticket.

When the partner table was introduced, there were 2 routes that were applicable for AU-EU with same flight number: SYD/MEL-SIN-VIE on OS and SYD-HKG-LHR on VS. Both have been terminated since. Even so, I doubt NZ would let you book it. I recently inquired about VIE-TPE via BKK on BR with same flight number but the call centre insisted they would book VIE-BKK and BKK-TPE separately. What a joke.

nzkarit

They may release the least amount of reward seats because with APD can buy any flight. Other airlines will release more reward seats because their own members need them as well as *A members. I would guess NZ releases the required % as outlined in the *A membership contract.

sbiddle

Sure they're stingey, but I think it's pushing it to say they're the worst.

At the end of the day US customers have their own US carriers for devaluing award seats across the industry as a whole.

The rest of the world doesn't give away premium seats for free and instead makes money by selling them. As earn rates skyrocketed in the US both OWW and *A carriers outside the US were faced with the reality of this - they were having to give away seats for nothing.. Seats that they could sell to their own customers for a premium.

If you ran Air NZ and can sell your 44 BP seats on a AKL to LAX flight for money why would you give them away to other customers for a heavily discounted price unless you really had to? It simply doesn't make sense.

Xiaotung

The idea is if you ran a good FFP and enticed customers by giving them easier redemption options, they might want to fly with you even more and be loyal. That's what a loyalty programme is supposed to do.

nzkarit

Easy redemption? I can use my APD to buy any seat on any NZ flight on sale and do OneUps (and there is the Elite APD upgrades (if NZ gave me Elite I could comment them)). I also think I could also pay for Koru using APD. To me that easier than a lot of airlines where have look for specific seats.

So APD is easy to spend on NZ flights. I have never spent APD on non NZ flights. I would guess most Airpoint members would only get enough points in their one year window for a domestic flight or a TT one. So for the majority of flyers it works for them as they will never get enough points to go further a field have to deal with other airlines when redeeming flights.

Xiaotung

Yes, it's been discussed to death already. APD is easy for domestic and short haul flights where the fare portion is very little anyway but try to use APD to redeem a long haul flight, you will find it virtually impossible especially in Business.

If you use Velocity as an example, you can use their points to redeem a reward seat and also an any seat. Reward seat is what most FFP's are using for redemption where points used for any seat has a cash value equivalent to any fare on sale. You will need 5-10 times more points to redeem an any seat than a reward seat. What Airpoints has done is simply getting rid of reward seat and only leaving you with any seat. If you think this is easy, then you haven't done your maths. Of course, if you only need the points for short haul or domestic flights, it's fine but then again, why would you use your points for something worth only a few bucks? For myself, I would never use my hard earned points on a $49 fare. For that I would just pay cash.

sbiddle

My view differs slightly on this. While I pay for 99% of flights and use APD primararily as a long haul upgrade fund I've ended up paying for a few cheap flights this year with APD.

Why? Because if I'm going to get 4 SP each way on a $49 flight as far as I'm concerned I may as well put some of my APD to use and save the real money for flights were earn is good.

My biggest long standing gripe is that Air NZ will absorb tax on domestic flights with APD, but not on international flights. While I understand their logic, to me in makes no sense when APD1 = NZD1 and for all intents and purposes APD are treated essentially as cash by the airline.

If I can go and buy a gift or bottle of wine using APD and the APD is essentially converted at 1:1 (yes there is a small processing fee for those stores in the Airpoints store and Glengarry who run the liquor store) why can't I use the same APD to pay for tax?

Just don't get me started on tax to Australia - the fact it's now up to NZ$245 in tax alone to fly RTN to some Australian airports is totally insane.

jawnbc

Air New Zealand is a pretty good airline--and perhaps the best international airline that doesn't rely on exploitative working conditions to deliver in-flight services (*looks towards Middle East and Asia*)

But you're right about Airpoints, it sucks. Ignore some of the replies here: kiwis seems to have Stockholm syndrome around Airpoints--which to my mind is the main barrier to members pushing back on some of Airpoints' nonsense:

+A ghost reward for travel from South Pacific to Europe
+Split reward travel regionally into award segments rather than offering across region awards like most *A airlines
+not giving us the ability to search and book our own *A rewards online (which I can do with AC/CX/BA/AS and many other carriers/FQTV schemes)

If there was a *A alternative that included a NZ credit card for status and mile/point accrual I would switch in a heartbeat. Or a CX/Asia Miles one.

drajknox

Most of the prices via the Airpoints are grossly inflated compared to their cost and even vouchers would almost certainly be being purchased at a discount. You seen many of the credit card reward schemes drop certain retailers vouchers presumably when the cost approaches voucher value and issuer isn’t prepared to give a substantial discount. Most credit card and Flybuys product rewards are mostly similar - the proportionate cost to the member is high when redeeming points.

davidkemps

on a similar note, you can't use APD to book hotels anymore, I used to burn up a lot doing that before.

Also the airpoints store is very limited.

Dave

kyanar

Spare a thought for us ex-NZ Airpoints members, who literally have no way to consume APD except flights, and can't use family pooling (shairpoints) or any of those other schemes to increase the balance.

No APD store, no Air NZ wines, all that good stuff.

tuxedo66

Yes, I experienced the 100 Airpoints Dollars booking fee today when I tried to redeem on Avianca. Fortunately I needed two sectors so it wasn't so bad. It would have been really bad if I had needed only one sector. I think it is a rip-off in the extreme, considering they do not have an online alternative for their loyal customers.

Even though availability was showing to the rep, the system returned as not available or unable when he tried to process it. The rep said, try again in a few weeks.