My experiences are a little dated but we traveled to NZ in '94, flying NY to Queenstown (about 24 hours) with 3 children, a just under 2, 4 and 6 year old in coach. We found Air NZ very accomodating and the whole country very child and family friendly. We spent three weeks driving North to Auckland staying in a combination of motels and bed and breakfast. At that time we bought a prepaid book of vouchers for the motels - they were a lower end local chain, basic but clean and had a cooking and living room area (being able to spread out and make our own breakfast or eat in for dinner was a real plus.

We paid for tickets (It was a time of very competitive fares) and with a child under 2 only he was 10 % fare and the other 2 were 75%. I have no idea if there is any discount for children for award tickets.

We loved the country and plan to return, by 2013 the Orcs should be cleared out (filming of the Hobbit completed). I would reccomend at least two weeks, more if you can swing it, we really enjoyed South Island.

United is scheduled to fly the 787 to Auckland from Houston, I believe next year.

Kia Ora

Star Alliance availability is poor despite UA flies its own metal there. However if one is willing to pay for J but book Y at the beginning, NZ is very good in opening up seats about 3 months to departure. Our first J award was using UA miles to fly NZ to Australia and NZ when it was only 90K miles in 2007, booked before the price tag went up. :D It has since went up twice! :mad: (But AA's OneWorld award is great because going thru HKG or SIN there are enough availability to work the award route. ;))

With the stopover at SYD, 150K miles are acceptable but the $600 YQ is not. :( AS has better QF availability than AA for whatever reason and no YQ. AS also allows stopover.

Thanks for the info. Too bad we are already committed to a HKG trip 2 weeks from now (AA miles on CX J but hoping to switch to F next week.) Otherwise, an award reposition trip to DUB, then pay for the EK F sure would be a nice indulgence, consider that a coach North America to HKG in CX would run $1200 already (relatives just flew that in November, they paid $1250 from YYZ). For 200% more one can fly EK A380F - it is a very tempting price.

if you use aeroplan you can get a stopover in RAR as well. In fact, it's much easier to find routings via RAR (although you get the 763 vs the 773/2 for the direct lax-akl).

booked one of those for 2 people for 160k points rt during the recent aeroplan sale.

I've booked it over-the-phone. Representative did not charge me the booking fee when I talled him the route is not available online.

I've used United to get to Hong Kong, spend about 7 in Hong Kong and used Air New Zealand to get back to the US with 4 days stop over in Auckland, NZ

The whole trip cost me 65000 Continental miles + fees.

Is Qantas a member of both alliances? How does that work?

Wow, 65,000 miles to fly to China AND New Zealand! That's an amazing redemption value. I just searched on continental.com for Sep/Oct 2012, and sure enough... Multi-City search flying from Omaha to Hong Kong, stop for a week, then fly Hong Kong to Auckland, stop for 2 weeks, then fly Auckland to Omaha. Final price? 65,000 miles and like $72 in taxes.

Now, punch in Omaha to Auckland round trip? 80,000 miles and like $52 in taxes.

Crazy, I love it!



The bummer?
You can't search or book this on united.com
How much longer do we have until continental.com's amazing *Alliance search engine is gone?

Sux you can't book that on United. I also wonder how long until continental.com's amazing *Alliance search engine is gone?

If you want to book that trip though I would book it before you can't.

No just a member of OneWorld. I think the poster had a typo.

can you transfer United miles to Continental to do the 65k thing?

What hostel card did you get?

Agreed!
Unfortunately I won't have enough Continental/United until the Months of Miles promotional bonus miles post, which at this rate could be a few more months, haha. Nor do I know my travel availability schedule for far enough in the future to book it yet either. Wishful thinking!

Agreed, what one? I know NZ has a few discount programs

People, you can transfer your UA miles to CO account instantly and as many times as you want for as little as 1 mile or as many as 100K miles or any amount you pick. The miles move instantly and in real time.

Did you guys ever read your emails from the CO/UA airlines to urge you to link both your CO/UA accounts by yourself? The deadline was 12/31/11 but apparently the actual merger of the 2 FFPs now is delayed to Q1 2012 due to some unanticipated technical issues ...

However the transferability has been there for almost a year now.

Also if you pay attention of the STICKIES in CO/UA forum, the latest buzz is OnePass will be the surviving program together with the interface et al - one of the evidences is, CO/UA already officially inform you via multiple emails that the OnePass account number will be the number to use in the future. If you dont have one, UA would create one for you.

Redemption with a baby
 

The OP mentioned doing a business class redemption with a baby. Typically that's going to be a very expensive trip, because the 10% lap child fare will be based on some rediculous undiscounted business class fare. Last time I checked for Australia, the fee for a lap child in business class with 2 award tickets was in excess of $1500 (I'm sure child-hating premium fliers on the forum would argue that is too little!).

Both in terms of availability, and cost, an economy redemption makes a lot more sense to New Zealand. The economy seats on the LA- AKL leg are 33” pitch, with individual TV screens, so nice economy class. It's only a 13 hour flight from LAX to AKL, so I don't really see the issue (but then I just did WAS- SIN RT and LAX-SIN RT in Y two months in a row with two young kids- up to 30 hours one-way with weather delays).

ANZ also has the Skycouch option, which would be good with an infant- I don't know if you can upgrade from a redemption to include the Skycouch (I know you can't get premium economy with a redemption). There’s more info on the Skycouch here-

http://www.airnewzealand.co.nz/economy-skycouch

If you are doing a *A redemption, you should try to add on a domestic leg in New Zealand.

Finally, ANZ has the best inflight safety announcements in the industry, though I don’t know if they still show these- check out the uniforms carefully-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-Mq9HAE62Y

Friendly

I just did NZ over Christmas break, got back on Dec 31. My advice is to be extremely flexible with award tix. Unfortunately, I couldn't be that flexible, and it was pretty nerve-wracking waiting until nearly the last minute to see if award seats would open up.

The good news is the Air New Zealand does open up a few J seats within a month or two of departure. I set up alerts with Expertflyer, and it was a great way to snag the one or two seats that eventually opened up. I did see some VERY last minute Qantas award seats in Y for their LAX-AKL direct service, but by then I had already booked my J seats on ANZ.

I'm in the middle of writing my NZ trip report, but I've also written a couple posts about my experience with booking award tix to NZ. I also wrote some tips about booking domestic NZ tix, which can be very expensive. You can read them here:

http://milesglu.blogspot.com/2011/10...w-zealand.html

http://milesglu.blogspot.com/2011/11...kings-new.html

http://milesglu.blogspot.com/2012/01...ip-report.html

That really is amazing, as it costs about that much in miles just to go from Japan to NZ.