I had an earlier stopover in Tahiti planned which I had to rearrange and we thought that it would be good to have one “South Pacific” visit while on this side of the world. So it came together that we would meet Alexandra and Annelise in Tahiti (United flies direct from West Coast) over Thanksgiving and Sharon would to the US at this time too for the Christmas break and this would be a stopover. Overtime, as we saw more things to do, we added a side-trip to Bora Bora. Additionally, my replacement arrived and this allowed me to take off for a real vacation for about a week and a half, so we routed Sharon back through Auckland to the West Coast as she had never been to the North Island of New Zealand. Further complicating is that we had accumulated about 11 suitcases and a bike and we need to start getting thing back to the USA, so we would be bringing extra luggage and having the girls each take some. So a lot of logistics but we had it under control and did not have much planned during the days – hikes and water sports/beach lying.
As we were getting closer, a “bomb cyclone” was coming through the US West Coast and we were getting nervous that the girls could land and/or take off from SFO. They made it without any delay. Our flight to Tahiti was 4 hours to Auckland and then 4 hours to Tahiti with a 2.5 hour layover for a total of 10.5 hours. However, our flight was 2.5 hours late into Auckland – and although we thought that they would wait as there wasn’t another flight to Tahiti for 4 days – they left us. They initially told us we were on a flight at 11:30pm – through Honolulu – the following day. After 2 hours of getting though immigration and customs and getting luggage, we finally got to talk to someone. Didn’t help much – stayed in Auckland for a rainy day, overnight 9 hour flight to Honolulu, 6 hour layover (we met Alexandra’s college friend – life saver to pick us up and take us to Waikiki), then another 6 hour flight to Tahiti.
Air New Zealand left at least 9 passengers and rerouted them to be 45 hours late. The comparison would be if you had a flight from Atlanta to Montreal and they routed you Atlanta-London-Montreal. There was another option that was 6 hours faster, but had a higher risk and higher out of pocket costs via the Cook Islands on two separate tickets with low budget airlines. An extract of my strongly worded letter to Air New Zealand attached describes all of the various frustrations.
Leave a Reply