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Since Emirates are departing the Auckland TT routes I thought I may as well give away my excess express departure cards from SYS/BNE/MEL and arrival express cards into the same ports.
There’s 11 departure cards and 7 arrival cards. Have to admit smart gates are pretty useful these days although now and then I see lines so I use the express lane (if it exists!).
Can put them in the post to either NZ or Oz otherwise they’re heading for the bin.
Cool offer Kiwiwings! Are the express departure/arrival cards definitely specific to Emirates? For some reason I figured the cards were the same regardless of airline.
Those are Emirates cards. The express cards I’ve seen all look unique to the airline. Just found Emirates express arrivals cards into NZ as well.
I could probably get rid of a couple of the others:
Qantas arrivals into Oz 3, Qantas departures from Oz 6
4 Air NZ departures from Oz.
I’m guessing officers don’t look at them too hard and if you have a flight arriving at a similar time to EK,QF or NZ I doubt they’ll blink too much.
They allow passengers to utilise express lanes for departures and arrivals. The cards are given to first, and business class passengers and those with status (can’t recall if gold are included).
I was just thinking about it and I’m not sure if there are express lanes outside of Auckland in NZ. I didn’t recall any in Wellington and haven’t flown internationally from the other airports. Pretty sure Queenstown and Dunedin won’t have them.
The Auckland express lane isn’t really my idea of an express lane. Smart gate was actually a bit busy last time I went through vs manual processing in the express lane but it’s easy enough to have a quick look at both lines and choose whichever looks shorter to join. Auckland arrivals had an express lane for manual processing instead of smart gate previously. I assume it still exists. But smart gate is faster with eligible passports.
In terms of BNE SYD MEL, if the express path is open on arrival it’s well worth it mainly from a customs point of view. My worst arrival was probably Melbourne during summer holidays with queues snaking around baggage carousels. It would easily have taken an hour or more from picking up bags to exiting. Of course it happened to be a day no express arrival cards were handed out and….well, it was that incident that made me start carrying spare express cards. Sometimes they’re not loaded on a flight. BNE & SYD seem to be a bit ‘luck of the draw’ on whether or not the express lanes are open. Most of the time it’s not too busy on arrival and you don’t need express cards but they come in handy on busy days.
Departures – Syd & Mel have express lanes. BNE hardly seems to be open.
I’ve had more domestic arrivals/departures to/from Perth in recent times but I don’t recall any express lanes there.
I think most of the time it’s pretty easy for NZ & Oz arrivals/departures. But it’s travel during busy periods or airline delays and an extra plane full of passengers processing can leave you queuing for much longer than you’d like. Stressful if there’s connections involved. That’s when you want to pull out an express path card.
Actually I haven’t really been keeping track but I haven’t had many express cards handed out on NZ QF or VA TT over at least the last year.
Ah.
I’ve noticed that things like Express Lanes, Club Floors in hotels etc are not common in NZ.
It’s about time someone grasped that these things appeal to a lot of travellers…!
When I fly into BKK I usually just go through the Business/First Priority lane anyway – never has a passport wallah asked me to prove I am entitled to do that!
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