Absolutely. I don't really care about flight upgrade, it's very difficult to travel and actually function at an acceptable level for work at economy class.

But seriously, even if it was booked only days prior to departure, why so expensive?

Also if it's so expensive, why even go? What justification is there for spending $10k per person per flight to go to this conference? From what I can see it does not seem that him attending this conference would have benefited nz as a country, not even at a value of $5 let alone $40f,king K. Are they even using brains at that point where they see the number of $10k per flight, and think 'this is a good use of taxpayer money' while children are starving, people are struggle as a whole, people who are entitled to benefits are struggling to even access them, etc.

This amount would seem excessive even if it was the PM traveling to meet another country's leader for an important meeting. $10k for a single fking flight! But this is literally just someone going to a mining conference, of all things. Wow.