I don't see any relationship - especially since supermarkets carry lots of brands of products and always advertise a brand when they promote a product.

Air NZ advertise flights to London on their website, banner ads and TV with their brand and a price. The fact you can't get that price flying all the way on NZ metal is what I consider slightly deceiving.

Absolutely, and that was only the point I was trying to make earlier. Some of the things (APD / SP earn, for instance) are made very clear when booking. Others, however, are not. And if we want to get really dicey look at NZ offering "recognition upgrades" and what has become of them. They are exceptionally difficult to redeem in some cases to the point of being almost downright misleading.

There is nothing misleading about flying on a partner airline when booking. This is very clear along with benefits and earn.

My point was simply the advertising.

Lounge Access for Koru member:

So if your AirNZ ticketed multi-stop is purchased via AirNZ & goes:

AirNZ AKL to PVG, Lufthansa PVG to FRA (would you still get access to the AirNZ/AirChina Lounge at PVG?).

And Virgin; LHR to HKG (access to AirNZ lounge at LON?), AirNZ; HGK to AKL (clearly lounge access here).

thanks ...

Pretty sure you'll only get access in AKL and HKG. Koru members generally don't get access to lounges when not flying on Air NZ (other than under a very few specific alliances/routes)

Thanks for that ...
It is actually quite difficult to book purely AirNZ on multi-stop long-hauls even when you try or want to -

You will only get access where there is an NZ lounge or if there is a partner lounge for a specific airport that is specified, and it is an NZ coded flight (or codeshare).

This tells you what a Koru Club member can access:

https://www.airnewzealand.co.nz/koru-benefits
https://www.airnewzealand.co.nz/part...unge-directory

In the case specified, AKL is obvious, PVG would not as it is not an NZ flight or flight number, LHR would not as VS only grant access to the NZ codeshare flight LHR-SFO, HKG would grant access.

.....

The multistop tool is very limiting. Best bet is to use the call centre or a travel agent for complex itineraries.

AirNZ codeshare Lufthansa. Last year I booked via Lufthansa a Europe return, & the airnz segments showed up automatically within my airnz portal.
This year I booked airnz, however can't seem to get Lufthansa to show their segment in my Lufthansa portal.

It's worked when I've booked SQ & NZ via NZ website. I've never booked LH via NZ though.

So that's the other warning when booking codeshare flights: Seat select online (& other online booking changes) may not be possible with codeshare partner airlines - that's another issue to be aware of.
You can feed in your booking reference into the partner website, & it may pickup your flight, but config may not be available.

To select a seat on the other airline you call and ask air nz for the reference number for the other airline.

Every time you book a seat on another airline via nz or any other carrier I thought it generated another reference so you can then call the other carrier and give them the reference number so they can pick up the booking and then you can ask them for the seat you want. Best if you've had a look at the seat maps via seat guru or equivalent and choose your preferred 3. Just beware the other carrier may charge you a fee for seat select if you don't have some sort of status (carrier dependent of course). For SQ it just said aircraft 'variable' so I just asked for window.

When I booked QR but my QF FF# in it came up in my QF app which was nice and since I was booking through QR I got to choose my seat.

So seat selection isn't a big issue. It's certainly better to do it this way than book individual tickets on individual carriers where you are screwed if the inbound is late by less than 6hrs (where travel insurance should cover). If it's all on the one ticket then the airlines are responsible for sorting you out.