Air New Zealand is rebranding its domestic fare offerings with major new changes launching this week. Along with a rebrand of the fare offerings, earn rates of Airpoints Dollars and Status Points have also been cut on many of its entry-level fares.
At present Air New Zealand offers four different types of fares on all domestic flights - seat, seat+bag, flexitime, and flexidate.
From the 28th September 2021 these will be rebranded as seat, seat+bag, flexichange and flexirefund
These changes are mostly positive, with the rather poorly named flexidate being rebranded as flexirefund. I never understood the naming of this anyway, as despite the name the main selling point was actually the ability to receive a full refund - as a fare difference applied when changing dates, it meant if you were changing dates at the last minute that the fare difference could be quite significant.
Many frequent flyers like myself simply book multi flexidate fares across different days in advance if there is uncertainty about return travel dates, and then cancel the unwanted tickets for a full refund.
In line with changes that have been in place since the start of the Covid pandemic, seat and seat+bag fares now have greater flexibility when it comes to changes and allow changing of dates and routes on the day for a $50 change fee and the applicable fare difference.
At this stage Air New Zealand are still offering full flexibility on all domestic fare types up until the 30th October 2021, with non-refundable seat, seat+bag and flexichange fares able to be turned into credits that can be used for future bookings.
Changes to the individual products are highlighted in purple -
Airpoints Dollar and Status Points earn has also been updated, with cheaper fares (in particular P, K and X booking classes) on domestic jet flights seeing a reduction in earn. On all jet flights the minimum status point earn was 8, and this has now been cut to 4. Earn on higher-priced fares appears to be largely unchanged.
While I'm sure there will be people unhappy about the reduction in status point earn, the reality is the airline industry is going to be a very different one in our new post Covid world.
