nzkarit

Also they are only allowing people in who have a ticket. There is an exception if you need one helper.

kiwicyclo

A

Ahhhhh. Domestic flight fix! Back in the saddle

bce1

About 50% more flights added to/from my regional centre today - much more suitable to a business day trip. And now some direct trips to Christchurch rather than via Auckland or Wellington. They now appear to be alternating single seat available / double seat / single seat on the ATRs - assuming this is what was meant by making seating available for people travelling together. Can now make some plans for June. Worse case would be dropping them in a couple of weeks if not selling.... time will tell.

Thai-Kiwi

Flight adjustments for late Jun coming in now. Interesting that despite some significant schedule changes (>3 hours) the options are to either accept the proposed alternative, or if not suitable then accept a credit.

Of course, a full refund should also be offered to customers in this situation since the original service cannot be reasonably met. For me 'reasonably' means 60-90 minutes in most cases - depends of the purpose of the travel and other arrangements.

kiwicyclo

I have just had an AKL - QTN - AKL (1st to 5th July) flight adjusted. Departure is now 1.55 earlier ex Auckland, still direct and departure ex Queenstown is now 3.05 pm which is 1.35 later. I took the punt and booked fully Flexi fares 2 weeks ago at a really low price, with the view of being able to cancel for full refund but also move flights around on day of travel.

I would hate to be paying the price of this flexidate fares as of today!

cavemanzk

This social distancing that NZ is being forced to provided on domestic is becoming an large hinderance to the the tourism economy restarting.
It’s resulting in high fares, which really aren’t going todo anything for he economy.

Yet you got to your local shopping mall at the moment, and there are thousands to f social distancing breaches happening every hour.

It seems an bit two fold, the malls are allowed to have people freely roaming around making contact with each other. With no way to trace who meet who walking around the mall.

Yet with allocated seating on aircarft, which we know who is sitting were etc is having to space people out.

nzkarit

Also have to consider length of time. Most flights are greater than 15min, so the within 1m 15min thing kicks in. E.g. restaurants etc fall into the 1m 15min thing so have controls in place, space, contact tracing.

Walking past someone in a mall (which have capacity control operating) is a different risk to sitting next to someone for an hour plus on a plane.

Also on a plane there is a higher risk that a random will talk to you (Even before this I never understood why people thought it was acceptable to say anymore than hello to the person next to you on a plane and ask to pass them to go to toilet). Speaking has a risk of spreading droplets. That is why restaurants and bars have been told to turn music off or down so people don't have to shout or lean in to hear one another.

Thai-Kiwi

I agree. If seated next/near to an infectious person on an aircraft, you'll multiple does of viral exposure for the duration of the flight. That said, Prof Baker noted that whilst he would wear a mask around the airport and on the aircraft, there is little evidence on transmission of the virus about aircraft. I won'y go into why he recommended wearing a mask in this circumstance given the variety of opinions on this.

Much less likely that you'll pass the same infectious person sufficiently frequently, or even a number of random infectious people, in a mall environment and so your viral dose exposure will be lower. Except perhaps in a cafe.

JamesBigglesworth

That sure as hell wasn't happening on my AKL-CHC flight on Thur. Packed. Not a single seat spare. Apparently social distancing rules don't apply to NZ on their aircraft. And at AKL they were asking for ID as well as ticket.

Thai-Kiwi

Well, here is the seat map I see for my upcoming WLG-CHC-WLG jaunt next month. You can see the physical distancing seat availability allocation.


The flight changes bumped from my seat allocations, and despite my TG*G status pulling up the seat map, I couldn’t actually select a Frequent Flyer seat. all resolved with a quick call.

I noted to the staff member that 02 D/E/F were all available, and he explained that was for families/groups of 3 pax. Same for 07D/E/F. He did a great job as I had 2 other PNRs with lads coming up from DUD where one was able to modify flights, but the other wasn’t and he sorted the lot.

sbiddle

Remember social distancing isn't required for those in the same bubble. There was a lot of discussion in the travel agent webinar on Wednesday discussing ways Air NZ could work with this which would help everybody by allowing more seats to be sold and utilised.

NZ_Flyer

If they used Amadeus then theoretical seating could work really well here to maximise seats sold while maintaining a spare seat between solo travellers. But I suppose every person they don’t fly means more cargo weight they can take (if there’s cargo to fly).

nzkarit

Assuming people cancel. During L4 and L3 they had high no show rates.

cavemanzk

https://www.executivetraveller.com/n...l-requirements

Interesting to see Qantas will not be blocking the middle seat, instead issuing passengers with face masks.

Wonder if NZ will try get this approved too, I noticed that air chats is going down the face mask route when they reset next weekend.

Thai-Kiwi

I wouldn’t object. There seems to be growing evidence that mask wearing has some benefits.