The saints of Air New Zealand

This is where I pay tribute to Air New Zealand who, quite frankly, have gone above and beyond for us on this vacation. I already lauded their praises in making our trans-pacific flight very doable but they definetly cemented their reputation in my mind for Saturday’s efforts. We had 2 scheduled flights that day, one from Queenstown to Auckland and the other from Auckland to Sydney. While we were in the QT airport waiting for our first flight, we got summoned to the desk and were told that there was a delay on the inbound flight and that she didn’t think we would conceivably make our second flight out of Auckland. So she very quickly got us tickets aboard a flight to Christchurch that was 5 minutes away from being done boarding. So we hurried over and got on the flight. After our first flight we hopped on another flight from Christchurch to Auckland. While on the flight, we were commenting to each other that we were supposed to land from this flight 10 minutes after the other one boarded and that was before we learned of a delay in taking off. That also included going through customs and taking a 10 minute ride between terminals. There was no way. So we rang a flight attendant and explained our situation. She told us she had just received a message from Auckland about our situation and that we were to meet with a special handling lady at touch down. After getting off the plane we were immediately greeted by an AZ staff member who promptly whisked us through the terminal to a driver waiting inside by baggage claim. He promptly gave us a private ride to the other terminal where as soon as we opened the van door were greeted by yet another AZ staff member who literally began running through the international terminal with us in hurried tow behind her. We took private elevators to premium lines where we were able to get through customs* and cut everyone in line for security check before running again the last 5 minutes to the gate where two kind gate attendants were waiting for us. We boarded the plane in a huff and we were able to take off only 5 minutes later than planned. Wow. At any point, in that day, Air New Zealand could have just told us we were going to have to wait for another flight and be done with it. It’s what we would have expected and were expecting. Air New Zealand, you have my highest praises.

* Asterisks goes to the guy at customs who happens to be the one exception to the excellent AZ team. Whether he hated his job, it was too early, was annoyed at the smug Americans getting premium service or all of the above, he just. went. so. slow. There is no way it could have taken anyone that long to match up a declarations form to a passport , stamp it and move on. I could just feel his resignation and annoyance burning right through me. Oh well, we were literally moving too fast for it to even sink in until we were in the air.