Domestic flights travel to 20 different locations inside New Zealand, and you can choose from many ticket options on each trip to ensure that you only pay for the services you use.
All of our domestic flight tickets include a normal seat assignment, some are flexible regarding the date and time modifications, and all of them are completely refundable with flexirefund. Learn as much as you can about your choices and choose the one that works best for you.
The world is said to be “post-Covid,” and the return to “normalcy” is often cited as evidence of this. While it’s true that things have improved in some respects (toilet paper is no longer a rare item), the high cost of transportation remains a jarring anomaly.
After a rough few months for Air New Zealand, during which the airline had more than its fair share of free press for its direct service to Fiji from New York, the rising cost of air travel inside New Zealand and to other countries has received even more attention. This is why RNZ decided to send a correspondent to the airport to cover the story today. Beginning with, “Air New Zealand is advising travelers to book vacations early,” the news item highlighted the need of planning ahead. RNZ went to Auckland International Airport to survey passengers on their airfare costs.
New Zealand airline fares were labeled “illegal” by press gallery journalist Ben McKay, which prompted a heated discussion amongst journalists all over Twitter. Crazy, as Morgan Godfery of the commentary team put it. A national leader in price gouging. To paraphrase what Newsroom’s Jo Moir said, “I honestly don’t know how individuals with little cash to spare who really need to travel someplace in an emergency are doing.”
That’s a reasonable inquiry. In the not-so-distant past, it was inexpensive to travel all throughout New Zealand. Furthermore, not just cheaper than just now, but really inexpensive. Do you recall the company Naked Bus and their advertising slogan “we have stripped off the expenses that you don’t need”? What about the exorbitant $introductory fare on the Northern Explorer train service? For a long time, driving appeared like the more cost-effective choice, but rising gas costs have fast made a cross-country road trip less enticing.
And what about Air New Zealand’s Nightrider, which offered cheap late-night flights to a few major cities for as little as? The national carrier could make air travel cheap for everybody by eliminating free in-flight snacks. It first aired in the early s for about two years before getting a short resurgence. They were quite helpful to me as a student at the time. And now that I’m a journalist, I’d actually like them once again.
It meant going home to visit wasn’t simply something you had to do during the holidays, but something you could do whenever the mood struck. It meant I could afford to go to another city to catch a performance without falling into serious debt. It meant I could avoid taking a Jetstar flight.
Jetstar, the budget option, also contributed. Jetstar has always strived to maintain its status as the lowest-priced airline, so when Air New Zealand said it would reduce its regional tickets in — yep, only months before rising them due to Covid — Jetstar immediately instituted a% price beat policy. The airlines’ once fierce rivalry seems to have given way to a more defensive stance. These days, instead of trying to undercut one another with lower pricing, competitors are trying to explain away the higher prices.
According to a statement released by Air New Zealand today, increased airfare is the result of increasing demand for travel, a lack of available planes, rising fuel costs, and inflation. It also stated that it maintained rates high on the final few available seats on every trip in case customers needed to fly immediately, apparently forgetting that not all persons in crises are affluent.
Although “normalcy” has been restored and the world is beginning to move on from Covid, the high cost of flying is a sobering reminder that times are not what they once were. Just this morning I did the math and determined that if I wanted to go home to Wellington for Christmas, I could probably do it for under $, which I suppose is now cheap. For the same time period, a round-trip bus ticket would cost close to $. Spending so much for an overnight adventure that lasts all of an hour doesn’t seem justified.
Any inexpensive kind of transportation would be a miracle, but a dollar fly-in would be the very best.
