Virgin Airlines - Where Some Passengers Are Treated Better Than Others
Despite all the advertising that attempts to make you feel you are important to the airlines (for something other than the content of your wallets) it is often experiences in these difficult times with airlines that show just how much they actually do care.
With the dust now settling from the volcano plume (or is it the ash cloud just moving on for another week), one tale shows just how bad it gets.
I was booked on a Virgin flight today from Brisbane to Adelaide. Last night I checked on-line and then they could provide no guide as to which flights were cancelled or delayed today and the customer service help line number advised they were overloaded and one should check back later.
This morning my flight did not appear on the cancelled flight list and so after some business meetings I proceeded to the airport. When I arrived an hour before take off, there on the screen was my flight, the direct Adelaide flight all ready to go on time.
But when I went to check in I was told to go to the service desk. My fears of a delay grew, but how? I had booked well before the ash cloud was scheduled to arrive again and I had no other advice from Virgin that my flight was going to be a problem.
What’s more I had arrived at the airport just as Virgin recommended – that was to arrive no less than 45 minutes before takeoff and that one should not arrive late in the expectation of your flight being delayed as that may cause you to miss your flight.
No, the service desk people advised that ‘more seats had been sold for the flight than were available’. Then, as ‘the flight was closed and already filled with those who had checked in’, I was to be rescheduled to a later flight, a flight via Canberra that would see me home too late to attend a family birthday event.
When I got on the high horse and said that I had complied with their every request to that time and clearly someone else had been shoe horned in from another flight, they did not disagree but ran the usual airline bullshit – a blank look and the question ‘do you want we to check you in for the flights via Canberra?’ Like as a passenger, you have any choice?
Now, I recognise that moments like these with the ash cloud create disruptions and for the most part the media’s coverage of hapless travellers complaining that the ‘airlines don’t seem to know what’s happening’ isn’t very fair as rescheduling people and flights must be one of the great organisational nightmares.
Not, also, that I am convinced by the ever prettier airline PR people they put in front of the cameras to ever so sweetly and innocently say they are doing the best they can. (When will the public expect and respect some guy in a suit telling us that again?)
But for a scheduled flight, unaffected by the disruptions (for it left on time), to bump a business traveller, a (formerly) loyal Virgin Velocity member, for some tourist bum in thongs who could turn up hours in advance this is not a great performance. What’s more, the Canberra leg two hours later was only half full and they didn’t even try to connect me with the Adelaide flight that left 30 mins after I arrived in the national capital.
Bottom line, Virgin Airlines just don’t care. You are number to be tolerated, Basil Fawlty style, until it make sense to stuff you around for their own gain.
Virgin, you done me wrong and you will pay for this in the long term.
PS About half an hour after my original flight departed I got Virgin’s automated ‘no reply’ flight details email reminder on my Blackberry about it. Great work Virgin.
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