Came down from IAH on OKU this week.
The interior looks tired. I can't see this surviving well for long term use.
In business no memory foam mattress toppers which was disappointing. This was the one point of difference for air NZ business that enhanced sleep. Maybe these have been removed to enhance customer experience due to extensive feedback.......
Service was also very poor in a cabin only 70% full.
Safe travels.

Couldn't agree more. Flew the aircraft the other week for the first time from LAX, and no topper, very (very) slow service (exactly in line with other reviews here, and I spoke with FSM, and heard the same lower staff to J pax ratio comments as mentioned by others), and witnessed a number of issues with seat/IFE performance. Having flown the layout in J with CX before, I was looking forward to the flight, but was left feeling that my experience was undoubtedly inferior to standard J, bar the increased personal space. How the same staff/J pax ratio could be justified with a very significant increase in number of J seats is beyond me, to say nothing for the consistent hard product reliability issues. If your hard and soft product have issues, you have issues :-).

I do have to add that my AKL-MEL flight crew on my OKW flight was also quite bad - service in whole J class was quite unattentive and didn't really see a single smile from any of the attendants I interacted with. I've had some amazing crew on some of my TT J flights, but this was definitely not one of them....

For others - my detailed experience on OKW flying SYD-AKL is here:
https://www.flyertalk.com/forum/air-...-akl-nz10.html

I wonder why no mattress topper? Is it because they would have to go in the overhead space?

Did they have toppers when with CX? As given shape will need a different topper.

From a review:

Came home on OKU on the weekend from LAX.

my business class seat was broken so upgraded to preferred . Extra room was great . Aircraft APU was u/s so delayed. Looking in FR24 on time performance for OKU isn�t great so be careful if connecting flights. 😄

Not great odds for on time

And relating to that last comment - for your information:
OKU is currently suffering an inop APU. It has been this way for a while actually. I have many photos of doing the walkaround and they are trying to fix. You need an extra ground vehicle called an ASU to start the engines. it. (it never gets fixed.. we need a new one).

But Greg told everybody at the investor day on Tuesday that these were great planes!

Ha. It is a growing worry that Greg doesn't actually know what takes place on the everyday shop floor.

Does OKU have a different brand of APU so don't just have an APU on the shelf?

He said at the AGM that the Dash 8 fleet has decades of life left too..

Honeywell is the exclusive 777 APU supplier. So, no.. it seems NZ only cares about narrowbody APU's, haha. No idea what the go is - it is frustrating for literally everybody though.
https://www.airnewzealand.co.nz/engi...e-apu-services

That's funny, because I was told they actually aren't taking any more Q300 pilots.