I recall asking this a few years back at the premium checkin as we were about to fly WLG-AKL-SIN-BKK and had arrived at 4:45am in the hope of getting through security bang on 5am and into some brekkie a few minutes after 5am.

The checkin agent said they had some flexibility as it was mostly around getting 'ducks in a row' for the AKL-SIN departure (in our case). It'd be good to know the actual rules/policy, rather than a blanket "2 hours before" or whatever is stated.

It's like how before an international flight (with no domestic connection), check in is advertised as closing "90 mins" before and bag drop "60 mins" before.
But in reality, check in closes 60 mins before (seen this with my own eyes when a colleague had a last minute visa issue).

Domestic check-in cutoffs for domestic connections are the same as the cut-offs for domestic flights - 30 mins before the flight.

Yes they say earlier because they want people to get there earlier - checkin often takes significantly longer and for many countries this can also require entering address details as well which can all take time. Somebody expecting to turn up 35 mins before their flight if they're connecting to the US could easily miss their flight.

I normally turn up at WLG at 5am for a 6am Aussie departure - 1 min to check my passport at the kiosk (seemingly don't need to do this now), then 10 - 15 mins to get through security and immigration and get to the lounge. Gives me 15 mins for a quick snack before boarding starts.

CVA?

Air Chathams

Also comes down to they want people to aim at 90min and have some wiggle room. Opposed to getting big queue of people targetting 60min. Easy way to under promise and over deliver.

Air Chathams as ZKNHB noted

ICAO code is CVA. (Three characters)
IATA code is. 3C. (two charatcers)

AirNewZealand is NZ or ANZ
Qantas is QF or QFA

Does anyone know if the app will verify non-NZ passports that are ICAO compliant?

Give it a go?

Australian friend with no Air NZ account. I'll report back if they want to try

Trying to advise a friend and don't want to start a new thread or bump numerous threads from the distant past.

Is it definitely 60 minutes and not 90 min as advertised in the app? They have a tight bus connection planned to get to airport so just want to be sure that it will work.

Can OLCI prior to 90 min "count" as the check in? Trans-Tasman ex CHC, Australian passport. They will still need to be there at T-60 for bag drop.

From memory yeah after OLCI it shows the bag drop time in the app.

I just tried my NOR passport. Scanned and validated - this will be a great feature I think!
App will only store the details of one passport, so those of us with dual citizenship will probably choose to validate our NZ passports,

Thanks for the confirmation! Means my Australian friend might consider signing up for Airpoints (as it won't let him use the feature without an account). He accrues with Virgin so Airpoints is of little benefit to him otherwise to sign up.

Can I be dumb and ask what this passport validation actually does/means? I haven't flown internationally much and "verified" my passport in the App in November 2025 but didn't even understand what that did given that I still needed to present the passport at time of airport check-in (we had luggage)

It pretty much verified that the PP info you�ve manually entered into the app matches with the data it gets by electronically reading the chip on your PP. It read all the biometic data, but I don�t know what AirNZ actually stores.