Air New Zealand Passenger Reviews and Air New Zealand Customer Trip reports

NZ175, AKL to PER on 04 Jan 2013. Brilliant flight on the 772. Business cabin was full but Crew were very attentive and Manager came and spoke to me personally for about 20 minutes. So refreshing after flying the outbound flight to NZ on the competition where I felt as though I was an inconvenience. Well worth the extra money, especially for an over 7 hour flight during the day.

LHR-AKL, via LAX. NZ001. Our first time with the Spaceseats and they were a vast improvement on regular economy seats. Being able to comfortably tuck our feet up made a huge difference for me and my daughter, and overall, the family slept better than I've ever seen on a long haul flight. Footrest was very useful in getting comfortable sleeping. Loved that the seat ahead couldn't recline into my space. Spaceseats only available on 767-300s though, so be careful when booking. Great entertainment system as usual, including ability to order (free) drinks and snacks from the seat. My tea came on a tray, with cookies. Excellent meal - more like business than economy. Very attentive staff. Would recommend.

Brisbane-Auckland-Vancouver on 14/12/12, good service and food. Disappointed we couldn't book Premium Economy all the way through, the airline has an allocation policy for the cross Tasman part, fortunately the manager put us in Premium Economy to Auckland, great new seats. While the upgrade was good it showed how bad the seats were in the next leg, essentially old Economy seats with a bit more leg room. It seems bizarre to have the good seats on a short leg! On the way back we tried to get the same upgrade for the Tasman leg but met surly staff at the Auckland service desk who weren't interested in being helpful so travelled the last leg Economy. No leg room here for someone who is 195 cms but lots of whacks in the leg from the trolley in the knee on the aisle side. A good flight experience overall impacted by a stupid cross Tasman policy.

Long haul flight from New Zealand to London return. 3 legs of the flight were in business class. The other leg of the flight was premium economy. Business class - Cabin was clean. Seat / bed very comfortable. On the first leg staff were excellent but sadly this was not the case on the other legs. Staff did not appear to want to help / serve etc - all in a rush. Not rude but not very polite either. Being a vegetarian I found the food was simply terrible. Premium economy - Seats were ok though not very comfortable for such a long flight. Cabin was clean. Staff were very polite and keen to help, friendly.

Premium economy SFO-AKL. Great crew, reasonably comfortable seats, plenty of space, good service, delicious food, lovely wines. Premium seemed a good investment. Seat was not that comfortable but ok and footrest was helpful. Someone told me these were the old premium economy seats and most planes were being refitted and are much better. Movie range not very exciting - limited new releases - and an old fashioned screen and terrible navigation which was slow and frustrating. Did a one-up upgrade to Business for the AKL-MEL section which was fine, great food, service, space. Agree with other review about charmless staff at SFO, but inflight crew were wonderful.

MEL-LAX via Auckland. Flight itself was fairly good, food was good and service staff onboard were acceptable. The only gripe we had was with baggage. We had a group of 4-6 people and each one of us had our baggage strictly weighed to max 20kgs and our carry on bags weighed as well. This went for both ways at Melbourne Airport and at LAX. Going for long haul, the baggage allowance is grossly inadequate, especially coming back from LAX where staff was particularly strict. We got away with it a little by distributing the weight around amongst the group of 6 but the staff we really strict about all our bags and baggage. Based on this experience, I won't be travelling on Air NZ again and have been discouraging friends from travelling with them.

Flight NZ2, from AKL-LAX. Previously flew Premium Economy in row 23 with Spaceseats. A good experience. This time we were in Sky Couch seats row 43. It was so useless my Daughter and I laughed at the ridiculousness of the setup. We are both tall, and there is no possible way for 2 people to be horizontal, so I sat in A and her in C and tried to put our legs up. And when the seats in front of us reclined we couldn't really move. The "couch" seems to be literally in the 5'x2' size range. Plus we had a surly older male steward to cap it off. Same good entertainment as in Premium Economy. The only thing I can imagine more uncomfortable would be the poor souls 4 across in the centre section - even less room. I would have to agree with other posters about the dismal state of the economy section. There should not be 10 rows across. Anybody over 100 pounds would feel cramped.

Flight NZ5, LAX-AKL. Row 23 Spaceseats worked just fine for us. Good food and great entertainment system. Places to plug in gadgets. Cabin service was good and friendly. Couldn't sleep in the space seat. Not as comfy of a seat as they appear. Good leg room. Were are both tall, and it made a 12hr flight tolerable. Vastly superior to the sky couch option we chose on the return trip, huge mistake. See next review.

Flight NZ135 to Brisbane and NZ136 back to Auckland. Flew out on a Boeing 777-300er. Flight time of 2 hours and 45 minutes. Crew were nice although the breakfast meal is a little on the small side. Aircraft is configured to the 3-4-3 configuration which makes the aisles thinner and you can really tell when it comes to the cabin service. The crew have to move from side to side when the have to retrieve items from the bottom of the trolley which I though was a bit unfair on them. The entertainment was good and the seats were a little hard, I wouldn't want to be on that aircraft for a long haul flight. Flew back on a Boeing 747-400 and it was fantastic. The aircraft may be an old one but it still stands above all the rest when it comes to space and cleanliness. Great flights, would not recommend booking flights on the new 777-300er aircraft though.

Flight from SFO to AKL, then connection to WLG. Check in staff in SFO completely indifferent, made a request and wasn't even checked if it could be accommodated. (Wouldn't have minded if he'd checked and said no). Seats are okay as long as the passenger in front doesn't recline. Entertainment is good, as is the frequent offers of water from the crew. Meals good. Overall, I hate flying long haul but Air New Zealand do a good job of it.

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