We flew back to Manchester from Orlando last Friday on Virgin VS076. It was the first time we have flown with them.
I think I had too high expectation really, and am therefore left a little dissapointed.
Firstly I had some problems with the online checkin for the outbound flight. We had 7 passengers, and when I managed to find a reference number off the tickets/receipts that it would accept, it kept forcing me to enter details for 9 passengers (2 repeated). It was quite a lengthy process, and I initialy tried leaving the additional 2 blank, which it didnt accept, and forced me to enter the whole lot again. I ended up just repeating the information and leaving it at 9, which finaly worked.
Although it took me an hour or so to do, the 2 hour later check-in was excellent as it meant our kids got up at nearly their normal time, and we avoided the lines of people at the airport, so full marks to virgin in offering this service. The seats and meals were also pre-booked at this time.
With regards to the fight itself, the only thing I could see reminding me it was a Virgin flight was the stewardess' uniforms. There was no livery on the seats, in fact it was something like a blue and yellow TA or something that looked like that.
We had 6 seats between us (5 adults, 1 child, and 1 infant with no seat). The legroom was good, and the TV system worked on all the seats. The games system however only worked on 3 of them, and stuck on "loading" indefinitely whenever you tried to play anything. However given the kids were awake the whole way, I had little chance to play anything anyway (but thats not the point). The prebooked meals arrived, and the normal meals were surprisingly edible. The flight path info map thing on the TV never worked the whole way on anyones seat. The staff were friendly and attractive, but they didnt come round offering drinks very often, you had to go up and ask (which didnt really bother me that much). The route was more direct (on other flights ive been on, it seems to go excessivley northwest before turning south over the US over Maine/Canada and be an hour or so longer).
With regards to inbound, the early downtown disney checkin was just superb. I cant praise this service enough. We bought that much that we had to buy 2 more suitcases, so there was no way we could fit everything in the minivan. We were therefore able to do 2 drives to downtown disney, one with bags and someone to watch the cases, and the other with the rest of the party and remaining cases. Wonderful. At this point the very friendly lady gave us our seat numbers (which had already been pre-booked), but told us we now had 3 bulkhead seats (and the 3 behind). We werent charged for this (and I know there is a £50 charge if you want them), and I have no idea why it changed, but I wasnt complaining.
The actual bulkhead seats werent that great however (although the legroom definitely was!). The armrests were fixed, and the seat width was narrower, and rather uncomfortable. One of the TV's (which are lift up) didnt work whatsoever (we later found out if we had asked we would have been given a portable dvd player), one had a headphone connector snapped off inside it, so there was no sound, and the 3rd the games again wouldnt work. The 3 behind also had the games problem. This was made more annoying because the kids did sleep, so i could have been playing Super Mario World, which I saw other people playing to wind me up
.
Staff were again nice and pleasant, and moved some people around to get us 2 empty seatsbehind and to the middle for us, in order for us to lie the 1.5 year old when she was sleeping (although the couple in the bank of 4 who were sat there decided to spread out to seats 1 and 3 before we got the chance to do so, despite knowing full well why the stewardess had moved 2 others......if your reading this, you will know who you are, and your' an ignorant swine with a body odour problem !)
One other thing of note is that the Virgin baggage allowance is superb.....twice what we have ever had on any other airline, and also allowed 2 bags each. We had no weight concerns whatsoever, and were able to buy 2 extra bags while we were out there to accomodate all our purchases.
Was it our best flight all in ? No, Still Laker in 1996 for me, brand new plane with leather seats and china crockery etc.....followed closely by the Airtours Airbus A330 which was on about its 2nd week of service a couple of years ago ( "the toilets are down the stairs"..."the what ?.....stairs !!!!" )
