The amazing team over at X Travel in Queenstown has been on a mission to help return families back to their home countries amidst the chaos of flight seat shortages and border restrictions.
For weeks, Fanny, Niki and Tori from X Travel in Queenstown, New Zealand have been working hard, day and night, from across the Tasman to help stranded travellers return home, after being stuck overseas for up to a year.
The LATAM flight, which landed in Sydney from Santiago this morning, is scheduled to fly onto Auckland where it will pick up South Americans wanting to return home from New Zealand.
Tori Keating told the ABC that it has been “quite the roller-coaster” organising the repatriation flight.
She said, “Getting the plane was difficult, getting the seats into Australia was difficult.”
“We just really wanted to try and get as many people home as possible.”
Thanks to the hard work of the travel agents, more than 120 Australians have stepped foot on their homeland again.
The charter flight, which cost passengers just less than $4,000 a ticket, cost X Travel half a million US dollars to book, which was “particularly scary”, but they went ahead with the financial risk as they knew the demand was there.
Welcome home!
The team documented the flights journey on their Facebook page.
In the early hours of yesterday morning they wrote, “Tori and Niki are having a pyjama party and staying up all night to get everyone checked in for their regional South American flights to meet the main event from Chile.”
At 9pm last night they shared another update that read ‘They’re off!’
‘Our passengers on our private charter LA1109 have departed Santiago and we almost couldn’t be happier.’
‘We’ll be back to do it all again on Thursday when LA1164 departs Sydney and Auckland to take our South Americans back home to their families and friends when our outbound plane departs.’
This morning, LA1109 has landed in Sydney with 122 very excited Australians ready to reunite with loved ones.
The team shared their happiness in an update that read, ‘We are so incredibly humbled and honoured to have been able to help reunite families once again’.
This flight is not the first repatriation charter flight X Travels has organised.
Since the pandemic began and threw the world into disarray, the team has organised four inbound and six outbound charter flights, helping travellers return to their homes and their families.
That’s TEN flights in total. Absolutely amazing.
What an incredible job. You’ve really showcased the #TogetherinTravel motto and are true travel industry heroes.
Congratulations ladies, you all deserve a relaxing break, ASAP!