After travellers were given a 48-hour period of grace to get home after Tuesday’s Covid-19 snap lockdown announcement, Air New Zealand said it was experiencing high levels of demand for flights out of the resort.
It used its bigger A321 jet aircraft for services to the resort as scheduled passenger services by the national airline, Jetstar and Sounds Air continued to arrive and depart from Queenstown and Wanaka Airports during the first day of Covid Alert Level 4 yesterday.
Auckland man Julian Herrera said he had a stressful morning yesterday trying to bring his flight forward by a day after a nine-day snowboarding holiday in the Queenstown Lakes.
It had taken about five hours, either waiting on the phone or constantly refreshing Air New Zealand’s online booking system, to bring his ‘‘flexidate’’ flight forward to yesterday evening.
However, fellow Aucklander Hideaki Arai said his flight yesterday evening was unaffected.
He was lucky his four-day skiing holiday in Wanaka had been unaffected by the lockdown, apart from being unable to ski at Cardrona yesterday.
Aucklanders Lizzie Langridge and Rosie Holt arrived in the resort on Tuesday for the three-day Retail Global Aotearoa e-commerce conference, only for it to be cancelled shortly after registration opened.
However, they had booked return flights for yesterday evening, and had even managed to bring them forward by three hours without any trouble.
In a media statement, Queenstown Airport Corporation said there were 32 Air New Zealand flight movements through Queenstown yesterday — 16 arrivals and 16 departures — and 34 scheduled flight movements today.
Travellers had to present proof of travel to enter the terminal, which was closed to all non-essential personnel and non-travelling members of the public.
Masks were mandatory in the terminal and on all flights, and retail outlets were closed, the statement said.
It asked that customers who did not intend to travel to cancel their tickets so others could have the seats.
HQ New Zealand managing director Rob Stewart-McDonald said the financial implications of the lockdown on the event management company were immediate and significant.
On Tuesday, his team had been putting the finishing touches on an event for a conference being attended by about 200 people.
‘‘We set everything up, and then took everything down again,’’ Mr Stewart-McDonald said.
Conference attendees were now scrambling to get home within the Government’s 48-hour deadline.
Two more conferences scheduled for next week would have to be cancelled because their delegates were due to arrive within the seven-day Auckland lockdown period.
Another two were scheduled for the last week of August, and seven in September, he said.
‘‘If this is over in a week or two, then the impact won’t be huge from a financial perspective.
‘‘But if we lose September, it’s a much bigger impact.’’
