Have just read of the awful experience noonafelice had on Virgin Airlines. We are flying from NYC to London on Virgin and were quite excited about it as we had heard/read such great things about them. Does anyone have any positive stories about flying Virgin recently?

Millions of passengers have very positive/satisfactory stories about Virgin.

Just relax!

When any airline gets stuck without a plane thousands of miles from its home base, things get hellish. Sooner or later, that happens to every airline. Whether it's more hellish on one airline than another is pretty irrelevant.

Why anyone gets excited about flying with Virgin is bizarre: they're just an airline. Maybe less able to cope with serious foulups than bigger airlines. But no more likely to put you through hell than to be wonderful. My own experience with them ranger from self-congratulatory OK-ness in Upper Class to self-congratulatory mediocrity in economy.

No airline is ever going to be as good as Virgin kids itself it is. But Virgin's no worse, 99% of the time, than real airlines.

Unlike its railway sister company, of course, which is a self-congratulatory disgrace almost always.

i've flown virgin and they the same...maybe a little bettr even than the rest. they have great in flight entertainment...word of advice, get some in-ear headphones and really be able to hear stuff...you'll enjoy it.

I think Virgin is pretty good to be honest.

<<from self-congratulatory OK-ness in Upper Class to self-congratulatory mediocrity...>>

a nice turn of phrase, even if it is a "re-work" of the old famous Dorothy Parker line...

(referring to Katharine Hepburn)...

"[she] ran the emotional gamut from A to B"



Best wishes,

Rex

Don't fret. I read poor noonafelice's horrible experience. But that sort of thing has happened on just about every airline at some point. Virgin is a good airline - but the weather on the east coast screwed up a lot of other flights too. it does sound like Virgin dropped the ball customer service-wise on that one - but in general I have found their ground and on board service better than almost any other transatlantic carrier.

And I bet if noonafelice sent a copy of her wonderful description of the hell they went through directly to Richard B. they would get some sort of satisfaction/compensation/voucher, etc . . . . . . .

noonafelice had a horrible time! But, I flown Virgin and never had a problem. Continue to be excitied about your trip and enjoy it!

I imagine Virgin is OK most of the time, too, if you don't have the bad luck combination of circumstances we did.

Also, you are flying from NYC, not Boston. I suspect that Virgin has a bigger operation in NY. In Boston they have just one flight a day, and very little staff. So they had no reserves when things went wrong. Finally, I will say that most of the Virgin staff were really very nice and trying hard to be helpful. I got the idea the management simply wasn't giving them any support and in fact may have been undermining their attempts to help customers.

Virgin's response to problems seemed to be mostly making their personnel unavailable so they didn't have to deal with complaints. I mean, no gate person is going to go work the desk if their manager doesn't tell them to -- so much of the time there was simply no way to get anyone to pay attention to us.

If your flight goes smoothly, as most certainly do, you should be fine. BUT in case of problems, here's what you should do ahead of time. Go to the Virgin web site at:
http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/us.../carriage9.jsp
and
http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/gb...sno2612004.jsp
and print out all the relevant pages. Take them with you so you are armed with the EU regulations and Virgin's own promises in case something goes wrong.

Unfortunately, I wasn't prepared that way (and in fact it probably wouldn't have helped me anyway since our ticket was through a package, not the airline directly). But I think many of my fellow passengers could have used ammunition like this when trying to get action.

Oh, one other thing -- try your darndest to get exit row seats. They won't release them for free until about 90 minutes before departure (up till then you have to pay $75 apiece). So hang around the gate if you're there early and you might get lucky.

For the brief time we were on the plane before they took us off, we could see that the exit row had about twice the legroom of other seats. We had snagged one and were quite comfortable. Other seats looked really cramped. (This was on a 747 -- don't know about other planes.)

Also, the center row next to the exit row seemed to have more legroom as well, and I don't think they charged extra for those seats. On our plane the exit rows were 33 and 51.