This is more of a rant rather than anything else but sometimes it's good to vent and at least educate others around the dodgy crap Air NZ get up to at times and seems to get away with.

I was tempted to book a trip to Seoul when I saw the Air NZ sale this week. Was thinking of PE over and BP back for a trip next year so spent a bit of time looking at dates and availability but have been busy the last few days and have gone back to look at things tonight. While looking I noticed that suddenly there were no cheap economy fares ex WLG.

The current sale lists economy for $615 ex WLG/CHC/AKL with $75 add-ons from other regional locations. For those who haven't been aware for the past few months Air NZ have been waiving the main trunk add-ons for some intl flights (particularly TT) which has helped due to the poor TT schedules ex WLG (lots of people flying to Oz via AKL just to get better flight times).

When I looked at flights to Seoul days ago there was huge availability of the advertised $615 economy fares from WLG-ICN over the coming months and into next year. This books into K class on both intl and domestic - which leads to the mini lecture for those who don't understand married fares.. Both flights need to have the same booking class - so you can book the $615 K class flight from AKL-ICN but to get the same $615 from WLG-AKL-ICN there needs to be K class available on both flights. If there is no K class on the domestic add-on both fares will jump to the next available class that both flights have available.

For some reason Air NZ have suddenly culled K class off pretty much every suitable AM connections for the next few months and into 2024 - so while there were $615 fares ex WLG for pretty much every available flight to Seoul over the sale period, suddenly there are now only 4 dates available over that period where somebody in Wellington could get a $615 fare. This leaves somebody in Wellington paying around $892 for the next cheapest fare which is T class for their flight to Seoul which is an effective $277 for the WLG-AKL sector so you're basically paying 50% of the cost of your flight to Seoul just to get to Auckland.

You can look at available flights to ICN from other regional airports such as NSN, PMR, TRG, KKE, WRE and NPE (just to name a few that I have looked at) and there is huge availability of $690 fares in K class ($615 + advertised $75 add-on) over the coming months and into 2024 during the sale period. But WLG and CHC are both being shafted by Air NZ for economy fares. PE and BP are unaffected by this issue.

We know Air NZ continually changes availability but it's this sort of crap that really annoys customers. I could go and book an economy ticket tonight for $892 but on Monday could easily find they open up large numbers of K class seats on domestic flights again and suddenly the price would drop to $615.

In what other industry would end customers accept pricing going up and down like this? We know airlines are pretty unique - we don't have supermarkets that sell the same loaf of bread at 13 different price points to different customers. But if I walked into the supermarket and the price of bread visible to me changed 3-4x per day without me buying it I'd be annoyed, and this is exactly what Air NZ now engages in. Prices can go both up and down multiple times on a daily basis.

I've often thought how amazing it would be for somebody to offer a website screen scraping and aggregating GDS data say every hour that shows Air NZ fares and how they change across the day and week. It'd certainly be a massive eye opener for those who don't realise the scale of what goes on with their revenue team and pricing algorithms... And would certainly show them that we're not all dumb and understand the stupid games they're playing that do nothing but annoy customers.

Glad it�s not just me �

Air NZ seem to do the reverse of what every other international airline does and penalises you for taking a connection - the effective domestic monopoly really burns consumers here.

Well recently they haven't been.. The problem here is an international sale that requires a married fare at a morning peak travel time for the domestic connection.

I personally think the fact a $615 fare is only available on 4 days across the entire sale period is basically bait advertising that breaches the fair trading act.

Yeah... NZ is becoming harder and harder to stay loyal too anymore.

I guess when you not AKL based you almost 90% forced to use NZ, being AKL bassed there are more options to avoid NZ which often are more cost effective.

I've taken to taking more of a risk recently on carry-on trips and booking seperate tickets for connecting flights, as the options that NZ are selling ex-AKL are ridiculously stupid.

And my prediction came true. I'm clearly know and understand a lot more about their pricing algorithms than I sometimes think I do!

This morning Air NZ have re introduced K and G availability across large numbers of peak morning flights to Auckland.

There is now availability of $615 and $645 in K and G on 22 of the 44 flights covered by the travel period covered by the sale, up from the 4 of 44 flights that have been available over the past few days.

This just gets dodgier and dodgier..
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Not just a by-product of today's 2 day sale to Australia? Presumably this has opened up some WLG-AKL fare classes married to those onwards sectors AKL-Australia ? (I haven't looked though).

I'm just looking at a return PE, NRT Flight from CHC end of Jan, and the Sale fares are showing only a couple of options for sale fares over a two week period. I've just changed that now to AKL - NRT and the sale fares are available everyday.

So essentially an $800 mark up each way if you don't come from AKL. Frustrating.

There is a chance that something expired in their revenue systems and it just needed a human to look at it on monday morning... seen it happen all the time! And to be fair, my inbox also looks pretty chocka come monday morning!

Looks like Air NZ are adopting the same strategy with their current Aussie sale that says "Add $75 each way for travel from any Air New Zealand serviced domestic airport." but fails to mention that the $75 add-on excludes trunk jet flights and is actually only available from regional ports.

Obviously pricing does vary on different days but it doesn't take much searching to see you can fly from any regional destination in the North Island as an example and get good availability to fly to to AKL and then SYD on a widebody for $75 more than the same fare ex AKL but that there is no availability of $75 add-ons ex WLG.

I had this very discussion with them last year and they promised to do better - their advertising did change but now it's just gone back to how it was.

I saw similar issues with a recent US sale, as a result we didn't book and are now looking at other carriers and even other locations so as not to use Air NZ. Domestically I have no choice, internationally where I travel for fun and pay for higher fares I have been using them less and less.

The issue with the lack of availability of trunk add-ons at certain times of the day will affect US flights but the issue I mentioned above with flights to Aussie is very different. With flights to Aussie it's not a lack of $75 domestic trunk flights due to the unavailability of the required booking classes at certain peak times, it's the fact these $75 add-ons simply don't exist at all if you're wanting to fly ex WLG via AKL as an example.

I've discussed both issues pretty extensively with senior people at Air NZ.

I find some of the advertising in general quite misleading, tiny price availabilities are one that gets me. An advertised fare that really has 1-2 flights available despite a sometimes large travel window.

I will concede the targeted social ads seem to be a lot more open now often clearly stating a very limited departure date, often down to the day. But when I see Price $X.XX from July 27- Sept 12 as an example and theres literally less than 5 days with said pricing it puts me off as a customer.

What routes are you looking at prices on? Are you looking at international flights with a domestic addon or are you referring to domestic flights?

My most recent example to mind is international with no domestic component AKL to LAX and AKL to HNL were the two I looked at at sale times. Different to the issue you are highlighting but similar vein in my mind that the price is *from but the limitations on those avaibilities are quite severe despite a wide date range.