Virgin Atlantic are annoying me!

[chrismoo]

Hi,

We made two different bookings on Virgin's site (had to use miles from two different accounts) .

When booking we were told by them to just use the seat map to keep our family together, we did this.

A few weeks ago we get a call from them informing us that the return flight time had slightly changed but nothing else was different. Again Virgin were aware of both our bookings and had linked them.

A bit later I rechecked the seat map and now our family is randomly placed around the plane, with strangers inbetween kids on middle rows, the other half of the party is miles away.

Called Virgin but their call centre is useless, its off-shore and they could not understand the referenece number even.

Emailed them and got an answer after about a week. basicly wait for the airport and they will do their best to sort it out.

So after this long story, my question is this does anyone have any decent contacts in Virgin or a high up address I can write to and complain.

Thanks

 

[wayneg]

I think this is very common when they change planes or times they must reset the seating allocation.
Even if you have prebooked all your seats together there is no guarantee you will get them at the airport as I found out at Xmas. Prebooked months in advance, Online checkin was not working so arrived at airport 2 hours before departure to find the best they could do was 2+2, 10 rows apart. The prebooked seats were ok the night before when I checked but not at the airport
We got no appolgy and told they do their best with prebooking but they are not guaranteed.
If you have to sort it out at airport I suggest you get there for the desk opening because 2 hours to departure was no good for us.
Good luck

 

[carolfoy]

unfortunately seat bookings are only ever requests and as Wayne says if the aircraft changes theres nothing you can do about it. I'd say try and alter it with on line check in the day before or turn up as early as possible to try and get them to seat you at least in 2 sets of two.

 

[chrismoo]

Thanks for the replies everyone

I'm going to attack the customer services departments a few more times before giving up.

Its understandable that seat get changed, but you'd think that if you had a group of 5, and the new plane was larger, their system would be intelligent enough to realllocate those 5 people together not randomly place them round the plane!

The worst part is loosing the online checkin as this really saves time but I'm not sure if they offer it a JFK.