{"id":9409,"date":"2024-02-29T05:15:15","date_gmt":"2024-02-28T16:15:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/?p=9409"},"modified":"2024-02-29T05:15:15","modified_gmt":"2024-02-28T16:15:15","slug":"air-nz-sorry-for-charging-tourists-13000-to-change-flight-after-terminal-diagnosis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/?p=9409","title":{"rendered":"Air NZ sorry for charging tourists $13,000 to change flight after terminal diagnosis"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Air New Zealand has admitted it made a mistake when it tried to charge two US tourists $13,000 to change their flights after one of them received a grave medical diagnosis.<\/p>\n<p>Todd and Patricia Kerekes flew business class from New York to Auckland in January. The return tickets cost $37,500.<\/p>\n<p>They intended to stay until April, but six weeks into their visit Patricia was diagnosed with cancer of the gallbladder. Their surgeon advised them to head home immediately, so Todd contacted Air NZ to have their flights moved up.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Right away on the first call I told them my wife was gravely ill, and we were on holiday and we needed to go back home,&#8221; the 60-year-old told\u00a0<i>Checkpoint<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;And it was a whole series of long pauses, and I couldn&#8217;t tell whether they were conferring with co-workers or working at it on the computer, or what it was. But I would go through a whole series of 15- to 30-minute hold periods, and sometimes the people would come back and basically tell me something I didn&#8217;t want to hear, like it was gonna cost me NZ$13,000 to change my flight.&#8221;<\/p>\n<div class=\"c-play-controller c-play-controller--full-width u-blocklink\" data-uuid=\"30374887-e1b7-4f13-b9f9-01d12c74f77e\">rnz<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Air New Zealand has admitted it made a mistake when it tried to charge two US tourists $13,000 to change their flights after one of them received a grave medical diagnosis. Todd and Patricia Kerekes flew business class from New York to Auckland in January. The return tickets cost $37,500. They intended to stay until [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":9410,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[222,174],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-latest-news","category-nz-news"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9409"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9411,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9409\/revisions\/9411"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebuzz.apnanetwork.co.nz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}