Air New Zealand Domestic Flights

... will get you from place to place

You've arrived!

Now choose your Air New Zealand domestic flights to get around the country...

After passing through Customs and Immigration, Air New Zealand domestic flights provide the next challenge.

To get to your first lodging for that well deserved leg-stretching walk, chances are you'll need to fly again.

Auckland roads are hopelessly congested (the infrastructural problems faced by the airport are not restricted to the terminal capacity...) and there is no rail service.

So that leaves flying.

We need to upfront about domestic air travel in New Zealand. It's acceptable but not great. But that opens up opportunities. And, indeed, those opportunities have been seized. Competition is rife...

So getting around the country by air can now be done in one of two ways. By choosing Air New Zealand domestic flights from their commercial schedules or chartering an executive jet.

Let's start with ...

Air New Zealand and their Commercial Schedules

The domestic airline market is essentially de-regulated. The state-owned Air New Zealand and Qantas provide most services but with such a small market, there's not really that much choice. They tend to follow each other around the country.

To give you an idea of what you'll be facing if you decide to use domestic flights, Air New Zealand operates the following aircraft on internal routes:

Boeing 737-300
Aerospatiale ATR 72-500
Saab 340A
Beechcraft 1900D

with the most common being the 66 seat ATR and 33 seat Saab.

Now it starts to get a bit tricky. The map below, also available as an interactive route map (opens in a new window), shows the principal routes.

But remember that you'll be staying in luxury lodges, a little off-the-beaten-track, or boutique hotels.

If you look closely, you'll see that to transfer between lodges, say from Hawkes Bay (Napier) to Wanaka, you'll need to fly to Christchurch and change planes.

The interactive route map allows booking.

So let's take the perfectly reasonable example above, a little wine-tasting, a round of golf at Cape Kidnappers in the Hawkes Bay followed by a couple of days at a lodge at Wanaka, the landscape on this site's home page. Flying Air New Zealand, we get a flight duration of 5 hours with one or two changes, depending on the flights. Overnight in Christchurch if you leave Napier on a Saturday afternoon...

But there are other ways to travel to and around this country...

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