‘Where has our $17k gone?’ Air NZ customer’s contact centre battle

An Air New Zealand customer is frustrated she wasted an entire weekend trying to get in touch with the airline to find out what had happened to almost $17,000 worth of airfares.

Air New Zealand has apologised for the incident, which it said occurred over a weekend when its contact centre team received more than 20,000 calls.

Shareen Wood was booking flights to the UK for herself, her husband and three daughters. They had $2800 in flight credits to use, with the remaining $14,000 to be paid for by credit card.

Wood said she had initially tried to book the flights online last Thursday, but wasn’t able to. She had tried calling the airline’s contact centre for help, but after spending three hours on hold, decided to give up.

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The next day she rang her bank, which explained there was a maximum amount she could access on the card she had been using. With that sorted, she went to book the flights again, using a different card.

This time the payment went through, but instead of a booking confirmation, she received an alert saying it could not be completed, and she would need to phone the airline’s contact centre – which she tried doing right away.

“Obviously we were panicking with the amount of money we’d spent,” she said.

But again, she had no luck getting through. She ended up calling three times that day, waiting on hold for around two hours each time with no success.

Over the course of the weekend, Wood said she made 13 calls to Air New Zealand.

On some occasions, it would sound like someone had picked up – “it all went silent. But then it would hang up.”

At one point she was able to request a callback, but ended up missing it, so had to arrange another one.

When the next callback came, she was ready – but that call ended up being an automated survey, asking her to rate how Air New Zealand’s customer service had been.

By Sunday, Wood, who lives in Kāpiti, had decided to drive to Wellington Airport to try to speak to a human at the Air New Zealand counter.

Since Friday, Wood had also been attempting to contact the airline over social media. It was while on her way to the airport that she received a Facebook message from the airline saying a ticketing agent was going to get in touch.

She received a call shortly after. However, after discussing the situation with the staff member, she was told they would need to transfer her to someone else.

“She said, ‘sorry I can’t deal with this because I’m not trained in international, I’m going to have to put you on hold’.”

After another hour-long wait, Wood said she was finally put through to someone who could help.

It turned out the tickets could not be issued at the time of booking because a partner airline still had to confirm their leg of the ticket, but otherwise the booking was confirmed.

Wood said while she was relieved to finally have it sorted, it had been an “awful” weekend.

“It’s the unknown of what’s actually happening – have I booked these flights, do I need to rebook, am I going to miss out on those fares?” she said.

“If it had been $100, I would have just waited… but that wasn’t the case, it was $17,000 and it was like, we need to know where our money has gone. It was very stressful.”

Wood said she also didn’t understand why Air New Zealand couldn’t have sent an email explaining what had happened as soon as she booked.

“It was just bizarre there could be no email to be like, ‘your booking has been confirmed but this is the issue’. If that had been sent straight away, I’d be like, ‘sweet, they’re going to issue [the tickets] eventually’.”

Air New Zealand chief customer and sales officer Leanne Geraghty apologised for Wood’s experience in a statement.

“We’re really sorry to hear about the experience Shareen has had. Being unable to resolve her query quickly over the long weekend would have been stressful and we’re sincerely sorry her experience wasn’t at an acceptable standard.”

Geraghty said the combination of borders opening and several long weekends and school holidays had seen a strong appetite for travel, and they were seeing many customers calling in to check possibility of travel, seeking reassurances about documentation and Covid protocols for travel.

“Over the Anzac weekend, our contact centre team received more than 20,000 calls and have been working incredibly hard to answer each one and respond to…