LordRaven wrote:Dimples wrote:We have booked flights for a trip to New Zealand for next year and I was keen to try Air New Zealand as I had heard good things about them. When we priced up the flights we discovered that as our outward flight was still in the NZ school holiday period, the preferred flights via Los Angeles were going to be fairly expensive whereas the inward-bound flights were going to be quite a bit cheaper. On that basis, we chose flights on which the first leg of the trip was with Virgin to San Francisco and then Air New Zealand to Auckland, as that was going to save us quite a bit of money.
Since then, Virgin have changed the flight twice - once bringing the departure time forward by 2 hours, which meant we had to cancel and re-book our connecting flights from Edinburgh (and book overnight hotel accommodation)... and then they changed the flight again. In fact this time, they cancelled that flight and instead put us on an afternoon flight which was only going to give us one and a half hours in transit in SFO, which is not even allowable as far as US immigration is concerned.
After chatting about it, we realised that they could very readily change our flights several more times before we actually leave and mess up all our plans yet again so we thought we might just have to take it on the chin after all and cough up an extra couple of thousand quid for the preferred flights via LA with Air New Zealand in order to have peace of mind. We contacted Air New Zealand to bring their attention to what Virgin had done and to look at flying via Los Angeles instead. After explaining all that had happened, the customer service agent put us on hold for 5 minutes to speak to her supervisor and then came back on the line to tell us that she was moving us to the Los Angeles flight that we wanted.... and she didn't charge us a penny extra extra to do so!!!
HUGE kudos to Air New Zealand for an excellent piece of customer care. Big pants to Virgin for messing us around and needlessly costing us money to cancel connecting flights and book hotel accommodation. We haven't even flown with them yet and already I'm impressed with Air New Zealand! I hope this is a sign of good things to come.
What a palaver? But great result in the end, well done. Are you going to both Islands? The south island has lots of fascinating glacial and volcanic stuff of great interest to visitors according to all my friends who have been, they say it is quite spectacular.
I have never ever been there and I can only hope I get the funds together to go one day.
A palaver indeed. But all sorted now, thank goodness.
Yes, we are visiting both islands so when we arrive at Auckland, we'll be getting straight onto a flight down to Christchurch. I daresay we'll probably sleep for ages after we check into our hotel.
South Island does indeed look quite amazing, so we're really looking forward to it all and it's also going to be fun and games meeting up with all these relatives I have never met before.
...this also helps
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