Flight
For our international guests, we recommend flying into AKL Airport. We highly recommend since you're making the big trip, that you come early or stay late to enjoy what New Zealand has to offer. From the US there are direct flights from LAX, SFO, DAL, JFK, HOU (and sometimes even more locations.) You can find deals on flights for around $800-1300 return trip, with most major carriers (United/Air New Zealand, Delta, American, and more) now offering different routes. The biggest thing to note for our American friends and family is you will LOSE A DAY when traveling to New Zealand - i.e. if you leave on a Friday night, you will land on a Sunday morning! Please consider this and plan accordingly (you probably don't want to leave any later than the night of Tuesday, February 11th.) On the return leg, you gain back a day - i.e. if you leave on Tuesday night, you should land in the US on Tuesday morning. The Monday after our wedding is President's Day, which should hopefully help with an extra day off work! For all our international guests, please note New Zealand has an NZeTA requirement that you have to submit online. You can learn more here: https://nzeta.immigration.govt.nz/
House Or Rental
There are a LOT of different accommodation options in Auckland (and New Zealand.) We recommend checking out Airbnb, the more local option "Book a Bach", or Vrbo, etc. You could also look online for hotels. Getting a house for a group is probably a great idea! Once RSVPs start coming in if you want us to help connect groups that might want to share let us know! Most accommodation you can find close to the venue is all in pretty nice areas - Takapuna, Devonport, Milford, Birkenhead. You could also stay in Auckland City (Viaduct Area, CBD) with options to drive, Uber, Ferry, Bus, etc.
Rental Car
Auckland Airport has a range of different rental car providers. If you're planning to spend some time exploring before or after, we would encourage you to get a rental car for the easiest and most convenient transportation. Auckland also has airport shuttles into the city and taxis available at the airport, as well as Uber, and local rideshare apps called Ola or Zoomy (at airport and/or for general car service.) You can compare rental car providers online, Apex is sometimes a cheaper option. It's about 40 minutes from the airport to near where our venue is on the North Shore (without traffic).
Travel Note
While lots of phone carriers do have options to pay per day for international roaming, we usually use Airalo and get an eSIM while we are overseas - a 30 day SIM with 5 GB of data is around US$16. If you want to try Airalo, the code ZARA3586 will get you $3 off :) You can also get a physical New Zealand SIM card (Vodafone, Spark, 2Degrees) in the airport with data/local calling, etc. New Zealand uses NZD and most places accept international credit cards (Visa, Mastercard, usually AMEX too) and apple pay (however, they do frequently have a small % surcharge for these payments.)