The first international tourists in more than a year will arrive on Rarotonga on Tuesday.
The first flight in the long-awaited New Zealand-Cook Islands travel bubble will depart Auckland on Tuesday morning as Rarotonga prepares to welcome its first international tourists in 15 months. The sold-out Air New Zealand flight NZ940 will have 214 passengers on board, and will leave at 8.55am. It lands in Rarotonga at 2.30pm May 17, Cook Islands Time. It’s the first Pacific travel bubble for New Zealand, and the first travel bubble for the Cook Islands after more than a year of border closure due to the coronavirus pandemic.
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New Zealand plans to open a quarantine-free travel bubble with the Cook Islands, prompting Air New Zealand to ramp up flights to the popular leisure destination of Rarotonga, the largest city on the Cook Islands.
The New Zealand-Cook Islands bubble is slated to start on May 17; a final sign-off will be needed by health authorities in both countries. There is already a one-way travel corridor from the Cook Islands to New Zealand that was established in January.
This will be the second two-way travel bubble established by New Zealand, following the opening of an Australia-New Zealand bubble on April 19.
Air New Zealand followed the announcement of the Cook Islands bubble by scheduling more Boeing 787 flights to Rarotonga (RAR). It will operate the Auckland (AKL)-RAR route 2-3 times weekly from May 18 to June 6, then 3-4 times weekly until June 27. The service is expected to be daily from July, which is the school holiday season in New Zealand.
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At 2445m in length and 50m above sea level New Zealand s third largest runway has the capacity to hanlde long haul flights. Photo / NZDF, File
At 2445m in length and 50m above sea level New Zealand s third largest runway has the capacity to hanlde long haul flights. Photo / NZDF, File
NZ Herald
OPINION It seems callous and counter-intuitive to suggest Covid-19 presents an opportunity. But for New Zealand and the Cook Islands it does. This requires an exclude/exploit policy: severely exclude the virus and then intelligently exploit
He expected a New Zealand-Cook Islands bubble to also open in the first quarter as indicated by the Government. The airline had been working with authorities, airports and border control to figure out logistics such as how to manage customers transiting through Australia from other countries, he said.
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Air New Zealand expects to operate at up to 90 per cent of pre-Covid levels on some routes when a trans-Tasman bubble opens. Customers who travelled between New Zealand and Australia or New Zealand and Rarotonga were generally going to be Covid-19 free, he said. “We call those green flights,” Foran said.