Hipkins has told Checkpoint government would give "at least a week's notice" if they change the decision around reopening the border for travellers from Australia.
"We set a check-in time and what we said when we announced it was we were very committed to those dates. But we've always said if we've got a vaccine-resistant variant, and we still don't fully understand Omicron yet... Then we would reserve the ability to review that decision.
"We'd be looking to give people at least a week's notice if it was going to be any revision to that date. So we'll be reviewing that towards the end of the first week of January.
"There are no easy choices here. We want to we want to provide as much time as we can to understand Omicron in particular, to gather information from around the world, about whether it is vaccine resistant, about whether it's more transmissible and if so how much."
