I've got a booking SYD-ZQN in August for which I recently received an email VA had turned into a SYD-CHC-ZQN marathon. The email had 'accept changes / decline changes-please-contact-me' buttons and so I declined. (The thought of the young daughters and I giving up a nice 3 hour direct for an 8 hour into Queenstown arriving late afternoon and then dealing with ski hire and a drive to Wanaka left me a little unimpressed). Naturally I emailed the Platinum line. No response, however I had another VA department call me to follow up and ask if I would accept the changes. "well, no actually".
The operative left me on hold to make some queries and I quickly jumped online to do some searching. Lo and behold, suddenly the SYD-ZQN direct flights were coming up again. That's pretty interesting. When the operative came back on the line she had the same info - "actually Mr Aus, all is well". I took the opportunity to ask how and why the direct flights could be removed and put back in again a week later, but wasn't able to really glean anything useful. Then I called AirNZ for seat selection. Their system had daughter no.1 and I SYD-ZQN, but oddly enough daughter no.2 SYD-CHC-ZQN (it's a different PNR). Since she's 9 years old, that was looking like a big problem. Back onto VA to sort it out and back again to AirNZ to finalise those seats so all good now, but glad I bothered to select seats as otherwise I probably wouldn't have known.
The operative left me on hold to make some queries and I quickly jumped online to do some searching. Lo and behold, suddenly the SYD-ZQN direct flights were coming up again. That's pretty interesting. When the operative came back on the line she had the same info - "actually Mr Aus, all is well". I took the opportunity to ask how and why the direct flights could be removed and put back in again a week later, but wasn't able to really glean anything useful. Then I called AirNZ for seat selection. Their system had daughter no.1 and I SYD-ZQN, but oddly enough daughter no.2 SYD-CHC-ZQN (it's a different PNR). Since she's 9 years old, that was looking like a big problem. Back onto VA to sort it out and back again to AirNZ to finalise those seats so all good now, but glad I bothered to select seats as otherwise I probably wouldn't have known.
