Joanne McNeill: Beer options for champagne prices

Air New Zealand needs to provide its advertised service reliably and consistently.

Christmas was a bubble, suspended in midsummer heat between the quotidian grind of last year and next, full of people and absences, love and laughter, food and beaches, sadness and songs, casting prismatic shadows before vanishing into thin air.

I know because bubble is one of my visiting grand-daughter's first words. She says it eyes wide, quietly, with a sweet glottal stop between syllables.

Somehow, perfectly, it conjures the sheer loveliness of floating light. Admittedly she does not restrict its use to actual bubbles (frequently blown for her ladyship's pleasure). It tends to cover blanket roundness - oranges, peaches, balls, tyres, even the golden Christmas full moon - although this latter was more of an astonished question, "Bubble?", as it glowed extravagantly over the horizon.

And, of course, as yet she knows nothing of the delights of the chilled bottled kind.

Pre Christmas, two of our guests - Tasmanian first-time visitors to Northland - were due to fly in from Auckland, to be collected from Onerahi airport at 7.05pm on December 23. Their sober chauffeur - who gallantly eschewed festive bubbles to make the journey legally - eventually returned from a fruitless 60km round trip to the airport empty handed.

Their Air New Zealand flight was cancelled in Auckland at short notice.

Stuck on a bus, they finally turned up at 11pm, tired, hungry and wondering what kind of third world Hicksville Whangarei might be.

Apparently unilaterally cancelling flights between Whangarei and Auckland and dumping hapless passengers on buses is an increasingly frequent Air New Zealand practice.

When it happened to Whangarei Mayor Sheryl Mai on November 22, she asked whether anyone else had experienced a similar occurrence.

Replies flooded in from ropeable passengers citing numerous incidents.

Examples included small children and frail elderly forced peremptorily to endure nightmare bus trips, buses breaking down, freezing winter journeys because bus heating (and, alarmingly windscreen demisters) malfunctioned, and many, understandably cross, travellers missing connecting flights, milestone events and crucial meetings.

Official explanations given to passengers for their sudden demotion to slow highway travel, some seemingly flimsy, varied.

They included "trainee pilots" (whatever that means, the mind boggles), mechanical issues, weather, shortage of crew (no stand-bys available) and insufficient passengers to justify flying. One passenger, informed the cancellation was weather related, finally arrived to find mere light drizzle but runway sealing under way at Onerahi.

Whatever the excuse - and certainly no passengers want to take chances with potentially dodgy aircraft, storms or incompetent crew - the frequency of cancellations is beyond a joke.

Northland is the secret jewel in New Zealand's tourism industry. Herding paying air travellers into buses is the kind of visitor experience which undersells holiday destinations.

Air New Zealand needs to provide its advertised service reliably and consistently, to explain the actual reasoning behind this annoying inefficiency and, given the Whangarei/Auckland flight is already over-priced compared with other routes and rarely subject to cut-price deals, to at least refund the fares of all passengers unceremoniously off-loaded (minus bus fare, which can be as little as $5 in online deals).

If passengers really wanted their bubbles popped by having to spend hours in crusty old buses, they would not pay champagne prices to fly.