It seems unusual that you are so willing to dismiss Vodafone so quickly. They are the largest mobile telco in NZ by market share with just under half of the market. They don't have the same performance issues as their Australian counterpart has. Telecom NZ had some very bad outages on their net...

I think the reason behind it is more to do with Virgin's status match. There will be a lot of people who got the status match and still have another 9 months of higher status with Virgin. So if someone has dropped to gold with Qantas, but still platinum with Virgin they might be inclined to sw...

Also China Airlines (from Taiwan) fly an A330 (sometimes an A340) from Brisbane to Auckland and return on Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. They often have some good business class specials.