Air New Zealand’s quarantine flights to Australia sold out within three minutes of going on sale this morning.

Air New Zealand Chief Customer and Sales Officer Leanne Geraghty says the airline was allocated a very limited number of managed isolation spaces to return customers home to Australia.

“Because of the MIQ constraints in Australia, we were only allocated a total of 385 seats to Perth, Brisbane and Melbourne between 25 September and 30 October. On some flights, as little as 10 seats were available.

“Despite this, we are committed to helping people get home. It’s an incredibly unfortunate situation for many people who are either stuck here in New Zealand or in Australia and our heart really does go out to those customers who weren’t able to secure a spot.

“We are in constant conversations with the Australian Government around whether any additional allocations will be made available. If more space does open up, customers will be able to book through our website. Our contact centre will unfortunately not be able to book any customers onto these quarantine services, but we do encourage them to keep checking our website for further updates.”

As the New Zealand Government has extended the travel pause with Australia for a further eight weeks, customers wanting to return home to New Zealand will need to have an MIQ room allocation.

“Once the New Zealand MIQ rooms went live this morning, we saw an initial spike in bookings. There are still seats available on all flights to New Zealand during the suspension period, so we encourage anyone who has an MIQ spot and hasn’t booked a flight yet, to do this promptly to avoid missing out.”