The shift from MIQ to home isolation for vaccinated New Zealanders travelling from Australia starts in today.

Airports are expecting thousands more passengers through their terminals this week and are ready for the influx.

Passengers arriving must now isolate at home for seven days.

The first flight from Australia lands at Auckland Airport at 2.45pm.

Donna Smith went to Melbourne to care for her two grandchildren before the pandemic, and has been trying to get an MIQ spot to come home since November.

Now the requirement has been scrapped, she is ecstatic to be heading home to Manurewa on Wednesday.

She plans to be the last person off the plane so she can dance down the aisle, and is expecting a few tears when she reunites with her husband, having spent their 40th wedding anniversary and her 60th birthday apart.

"He cried and I said you know, I'm okay, I'll be home soon," she says.

"So I told him don't come in the airport because you'll just start wailing at me and then you'll make me cry, so yes, we'll probably both cry."

The change from MIQ to self-isolation has not meant a rush to book tickets for everyone, however.

Simon Rayner moved to Melbourne about 10 years ago, and before the pandemic, came back to New Zealand two or three times a year.

He says the shift to self-isolation is great for those moving back home permanently but is not much help for the many New Zealanders who want to come home for a short visit.

"They don't want to go over and go to Queenstown and go skiing and stuff, they want to go see their families and friends," he sas.

"But if you're working full time obviously you have to take leave to do that, so to take seven days leave before you've even gone and visited anybody really trims valuable time catching up with people right down."

Rayner says making travellers self-isolate seems pointless when there are more cases in the community than at the border.

Auckland Airport's general manager of operations, Anna Cassels-Brown, says New Zealand's largest airport is ready for the expected rush.

She says about 7000 passengers are expected this week alone, compared with just under 3000 in the whole of December.

"We are certainly a smaller organisation than we were pre-Covid but we haven't had to bring additional people in at this stage," she says.

"Once the numbers do increase then we may have to look at that, but for now we're in a good state."

Christchurch Airport will see its first flight from Australia land today at 5.30pm from Brisbane.

Twenty-six international flights are scheduled to land there this week, three times as many as last week.

Wellington's first international flight is not scheduled until the end of March.

-RNZ/Soumya Bhamidipati.