Hi All,
Based on the recommendations in this forum, we decided to buy a couple of Virgin Aloha phones and have them shipped to our resort. We arrived in Orlando yesterday and they were there at SSR waiting for us (Yay!)
We took them back to the room and began trying to activate them. The on-line process appeared to be going well until I got to the point where I had to power on the phone and call Virgin to do the activation. I was assigned a 407 area code phone number, but the instructions on the web site didn't line up with the prompts I was seeing on the phone so I did my best and tried to pick what I thought was right. In the end though, both of the phones wouldn't activate correctly and the phone told me to call the Virgin 1-800 number.
When I spoke to a 'Live Advisor' they had no record of the phone number I had just been assigned on the web or the hard-coded serial number on the phone.
They suggested I wait a few hours for the system synchronize or something like that.
This afternoon (after visiting Sea World), I tried again. I spend well over an hour on the phone with two different 'Live Advisors' who were very professional and tried their best but ultimately unable to help me out. The last one I spoke with said that I wasn't supposed to activate the phone the way I did (THE WAY THE INSTRUCTIONS TOLD ME) but instead said that the phone was already activated when I bought it... or something like that. they said they could bump my problem up to the 'Investigation Department' but that it would take 24-72 hours for them to get back to me. As I need the phones to work NOW, I told them that wouldn't do me any good.
I asked if I could return and/or replace the phones to the Virgin Mega Store and they said that I probably could. We just got back from Downtown Disney and the Virgin Mega Store wouldn't / couldn't help me. For starters, they didn't have any Aloha phones and even if they did, Virgin Mobile and Virgin Mega Stores are not really all that closely related.
So, I ended up stuffing the phones into a garbage can on the way out of Downtown Disney. I'm not really all that disappointed about blowing $20-ish on the phones... it's the over 2 hours I spent tying to activate them and on the phone with Virgin. I'd rather have been hanging out on the pool... or nearly anything else really.
Next time, I'll probably go with an AT&T phone again like I did last year. It would cost a little more, but at least it worked.
Oh, one other thing. The kid at the Virgin Mega Store said that they weren't selling the Aloha anymore, so maybe it won't be an option anyway.