Air New Zealand review by Mark Teale

We travelled from LAX to Auckland, Auckland to Brisbane, Brisbane to Auckland and Auckland to Los Angeles. Of the four flights one was cancelled and the return to Los Angeles ANZ cancelled our Skycouch and we spent 4 hours on the phone with customer service to rebook the flight. The Skycouch was cancelled because they had to substitute for another plane without a skycouch option. There were no seats together for the original 13 hour flight so my wife and I asked customer service to rebook us on the following day. This took 4 hours on the phone. The website and app we unable to do any of this change. It seems the customer service staff had to put us on hold for 15 minutes to 20 minutes at a time. At one stage the customer service said they were contacting the airport to verify seat allocation. We got a new e-ticket emailed to us that did not show the Skycouch, or any seat allocation. When we called to ask about this which took an additional 45 minutes, the customer service representative told us they could not correct it because "our reservation had been changed too many times". Let me assure you that all of the changes were done because Air New Zealand cancelled our earlier flight and we spent many hours on the phone rebooking that flight. This all happened 28 hours before departure and I was never personally informed of the problem. My sister with a separate booking was informed 34 hours before and it was only because of her contacting Air New Zealand that we even found out there was a problem with our booking. I was born in New Zealand and feel it is helping the country by flying Air New Zealand but that loyalty is now broken. The actual flights, cabin crew and even the customer service staff themselves were good to very good but they don't seem to be able to forecast the service to their planes more than 48 hours ahead of time and this causes a cascade effect to their customers. If their customer service staff had the tools to make corrections it would be less painful but when it took 4 hours to rebook a flight and make a seat allocation that shows there is something very wrong about their system. I personally know if many other people who have experienced very similar failures by Air New Zealand including my sister and a cousin. I hope that Air New Zealand can fix the problem and recover from this failure. Regards, Mark Teale, Architect