It was a last minute thing that we decided to visit New Zealand. You see I was actually planning a trip to Tahiti. John and I had an exchanged time share week that was about to expire. And since it was set to expire just after our daughters wedding, we decided to splurge. Tahiti is what we had settled on.
Because we were in the throes of planning a wedding, well, let’s be real, I was, I was a little behind in booking everything for Tahiti. Oh we had the lodging all set through our time share exchange program. But it was time to book the flights.

What I soon realized was, the airfare had gone up by about $350 a person. Ouch. I started looking at all of our options. Finding the hubs for Tahiti flights and checking out options from different cities. With our Southwest miles, we knew we could most likely get where we needed to go, and then purchase a ticket from there to Tahiti. Auckland kept coming up and I decided to see where that was. New Zealand. For some completely illogical reason, we could fly from LA to Tahiti for $3,200 total. Or, we could fly the same flight from LA, stop in Tahiti, and fly on to New Zealand, then back to Tahiti, and then home to LA, for $2,300 total. And that, is when we decided to see a little bit of New Zealand.