Departure airport experience: I’d purchased economy seats, on sale, for myself, my wife and two daughters. You don’t want to hear any alarm sounds when you’re at the airport but, as the attendant tried to scan our boarding passes, the machine beeped and flashed red.
Daisy and Hazel in business. Photo / Jesse Mulligan
Passengers: It was like we were being punked. I’d quietly told my chatty girls that they should expect the other passengers to be a bit serious. But the 20 or so people in our cabin were all varying shades of angelic.
“Where are my headphones?” Daisy asked me at one point
“You can use mine!” said a businessman, bounding over from three seats away. “I like to bring my own.”
An elderly woman was flying business for the first time too. Her son had been upgraded but had decided to gift the experience to her. When a stranger overheard that someone had a family member in another part of the plane he leaned over and literally said “would your daughter like my seat in business? I’m happy to fly premium so you guys can be together.”
“THIS IS NOT NORMAL” I said again, to my daughters and in fact the whole cabin.
Crew: Warm and authoritative, with genuine excitement to be part of our girls’ special experience.
Now bear with me but I need to tell you about a dog. There is a dog, in Tokyo, near the airport where the crew stay over. One of the flight attendants noticed the dog seemed a bit lonely so she has organised a roster system where Air NZ crew feed and walk the dog when they are in Japan. This system has now been in place for some years. So, yeah, they are good people.
Food and drink: Multi-option, multi-course and very high end, with craft beers and excellent wines. You end up very full, with the blissful knowledge you’ll have eight horizontal hours under a duvet to work up an appetite for more.
“What was your favourite thing you ate?” I asked Daisy. She said “the garlic bread”.
As a restaurant reviewer I wanted my daughter to choose something fancier, but as someone who had eaten the garlic bread myself, I couldn’t disagree. Hot, soft and drenched in garlicky butter it was just awesome. So why, in 2024, is a plane the only place you can get it?
Entertainment: I don’t know this for a fact but it seems like the system has had a massive content injection since we last flew in September. This time I binged the final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm and laughed too loudly (altitude does weird things to your emotions: my wife watched the Matariki special and cried too loudly).
The best bit: Watching my two daughters sleeping peacefully and knowing they’d be in great form when we landed.
The worst bit: When I suggested we take them on a “tour of economy class” part way through the flight to try and emphasise the value of the upgrade, and Victoria forbade it on the grounds the idea was “sick”.
Final verdict: We would have been very happy in normal seats. But business was so good, we didn’t want the flight to end.
