- Joined
- Feb 13, 2009
- Posts
- 2,358
Hi all,
I had an interesting experience last week with my Virgin Australia flights and wanted to see what others thought of this experience and had any advice/feedback/suggestions. Unfortunately, this did happen around Ash Cloud version 2.0, but I don’t think it had too much of an impact for most issues I discuss below.
I originally had flights OOL-CBR via SYD in PE Wednesday morning and returning CBR-CNS via SYD in PE Thursday night. Ash cloud pushed outbound flights to Thursday morning, but that’s fine.
Boarded at OOL on-time (06:00) but a technical fault in coughpit meant we were delayed about 30-40 minutes. I don’t understand why the faults only get picked up in the last 5 minutes before they’re about to close the door? What are the pilots doing up there beforehand? And how come faults like this suddenly appear in the morning when the plane gets “turned on”? Yes, I know things can go wrong anytime, and I’m glad it’s on the ground, not in the air – but why then? Was the fault there when the pilots landed the previous night and they just chose to ignore it because it wasn’t their problem anymore?
(In a similar vein, I once had an experience on another first-flight-out in which the pilot discovered their seat-belt was broken only after the door was closed and we were about to push-back. This lead to an hour delay that time! Again, why only then are they discovering these faults then? Why couldn’t you check the seat belt when you sat down? And was it broken when it landed the previous night??)
We had a missed-approach on our landing into SYD, just to add to the starting-drama for the day.
The delay meant I missed my 08:05 connection to CBR, but only by about 5-10 minutes. Considering I only had carry on, I was a little disappointed they couldn’t hold the aircraft, and when I went to collect my new boarding pass for the 11:35 service (3.5 hours later!), it was apparent there were quite a few (possibly > dozen…?) pax connecting through to CBR, so thought it was even more inconsiderate that they couldn’t hold the flight. (For those with baggage, surely it could’ve followed…?)
I was joined by a work colleague in SYD, who was doing just the SYD-CBR-SYD sectors with me on their own PE ticket.We had meetings in CBR just for that day, so the delay caused a fair bit of inconvenience.
With PE ticket, was able to enter the Lounge in SYD for the wait, which was appreciated. However, I recently reached Silver level and received a “Free pass” entry to Lounge against my account. When I checked my account yesterday, it appears that the free pass has disappeared. Should that have happened considering I had a PE ticket?
Left the Lounge to catch the flight around the advertised boarding time (I can’t recall if we waited for a Lounge PA call), but once we got down to the gate, there was a gate change, and then it was apparent there was going to be a delay as the operating aircraft was delayed coming in from Port Macquarie. Why couldn’t they correctly update the flight status to show the potential delay so that we could’ve hung around the Lounge a bit longer? They would’ve known about the delay potentially as soon as it left Port Macquarie, or at least mid-flight.
We boarded, and I had 1F. My original seat selection on the original flight was 2A as I don’t like row 1 with the tray-table in the arm rests: it’s a bit of a pain to work with when you’re trying to juggle laptops and possibly get up and down etc. How come my original seat selection on the original flight didn’t flow through to the new flight? (row 2 was vacant)
Once we boarded, we waited, and then waited some more, and then got an announcement from the Pilot that they had a fail-to-board pax with luggage, and so they had to retrieve the bags. We were really feeling that the day was a comedy-of-errors by this stage.
We finally arrived in CBR around 13:30-14:00 and got to our meetings. Got through part of what we needed to, and then headed off at 16:00 to head back to catch the 17:00 flight to SYD.
Flight was slightly delayed there as well – operating aircraft was pulling in after the advertised boarding time, and once again, no update to the flight status on the displays. However, this meant we got to enjoy a beverage in the Lounge at CBR anyway, and considering the day we’d had, this was a welcome retreat.
On boarding the CBR flight, the CSM appeared somewhat stressed, and possibly didn’t realise how loud her vocalisation of this stress was. I gathered from her discussion with the other FAs that they were trying to work out how they were going to deal with taking orders from a few PE pax AND deliver all the meals for Flexi-fare pax (there must’ve been quite a few, which I guess you’d expect on a flight out of CBR) AND do a cash-cart run for other pax all within the 20 minute flight time! Seems that VA has a few things to iron out on some of its shorter sectors.
They overcame the first issue by taking our PE order before the door closed, and got that ready: I would’ve been happy to grab the box of chips and put them in the back-seat pouch before take-off if that had’ve been helpful for them!
Got through to SYD without too many other dramas, and then got to enjoy the Lounge again for the evening until my 19:20 flight to CNS.
I guess I expected the flight to CNS to be full. It’s only an E90 and is often full normally, so would expect even more so as the impact of the ash cloud started to settle (pardon the pun!) So in PE, I had non-PE seated pax all around me: a group of fellas heading to CNS for a boys-weekend. That’s fine. I enjoyed talking with the fella next to me, shared my digi-player movie with him and appreciated the fact that Tourists are still heading to CNS, which we sorely need for the economy up there! Of course, other than the extra leg room, they didn’t get the PE service.
However, what disappointed me most was that my choice of drinks wasn’t available on the flight: and I was served first! I’d hate to imagine what was available by the time the cart got to the back of the plane! When I went for a walk at one stage, the CSM did apologise about the full flight and pax around me in PE (I wasn’t concerned about that). He also apologised about the limited food/drink selection and suggested that the carts are only filled up at the start of the day and whatever’s left by the end of the day, that’s it! Is this correct? Don’t they replenish stock during the day? Yes, I understand that they have their usual spiel “we apologise if your selection is not available”, but considering they *know* the flights are going to be full for getting pax moving around after the ash cloud, surely they could handle the catering much better to keep pax happier and even potentially make up for lost revenue from the previous day?
My main concern from this aspect is that I have another PE ticket booked, SYD-CNS, for Thursday this week. I was lucky that my client paid for last week’s, but this one has come out of my own pocket, and I’ve purposely chosen this product for the product and service offering, not cause I’ve got a lot of cash to splash around! I will be very disappointed if my experience turns out to be the same as this last flight.
I don’t quite feel to put in a “complaint” or “feedback” comment for any of the above, but thought I’d see what others thought of the whole experience. Did I just encounter a bad day with an unfortunate set of circumstances?
If VA are pushing more for business travel, then I’d think they’d have to improve on some of the areas above? Yes, I know they can’t control the ash cloud and its rolling affects, nor the initial fault-based delay etc. etc. but I think there are a few things they could improve on in some of the situations above. What do others think?
I had an interesting experience last week with my Virgin Australia flights and wanted to see what others thought of this experience and had any advice/feedback/suggestions. Unfortunately, this did happen around Ash Cloud version 2.0, but I don’t think it had too much of an impact for most issues I discuss below.
I originally had flights OOL-CBR via SYD in PE Wednesday morning and returning CBR-CNS via SYD in PE Thursday night. Ash cloud pushed outbound flights to Thursday morning, but that’s fine.
Boarded at OOL on-time (06:00) but a technical fault in coughpit meant we were delayed about 30-40 minutes. I don’t understand why the faults only get picked up in the last 5 minutes before they’re about to close the door? What are the pilots doing up there beforehand? And how come faults like this suddenly appear in the morning when the plane gets “turned on”? Yes, I know things can go wrong anytime, and I’m glad it’s on the ground, not in the air – but why then? Was the fault there when the pilots landed the previous night and they just chose to ignore it because it wasn’t their problem anymore?
(In a similar vein, I once had an experience on another first-flight-out in which the pilot discovered their seat-belt was broken only after the door was closed and we were about to push-back. This lead to an hour delay that time! Again, why only then are they discovering these faults then? Why couldn’t you check the seat belt when you sat down? And was it broken when it landed the previous night??)
We had a missed-approach on our landing into SYD, just to add to the starting-drama for the day.
The delay meant I missed my 08:05 connection to CBR, but only by about 5-10 minutes. Considering I only had carry on, I was a little disappointed they couldn’t hold the aircraft, and when I went to collect my new boarding pass for the 11:35 service (3.5 hours later!), it was apparent there were quite a few (possibly > dozen…?) pax connecting through to CBR, so thought it was even more inconsiderate that they couldn’t hold the flight. (For those with baggage, surely it could’ve followed…?)
I was joined by a work colleague in SYD, who was doing just the SYD-CBR-SYD sectors with me on their own PE ticket.We had meetings in CBR just for that day, so the delay caused a fair bit of inconvenience.
With PE ticket, was able to enter the Lounge in SYD for the wait, which was appreciated. However, I recently reached Silver level and received a “Free pass” entry to Lounge against my account. When I checked my account yesterday, it appears that the free pass has disappeared. Should that have happened considering I had a PE ticket?
Left the Lounge to catch the flight around the advertised boarding time (I can’t recall if we waited for a Lounge PA call), but once we got down to the gate, there was a gate change, and then it was apparent there was going to be a delay as the operating aircraft was delayed coming in from Port Macquarie. Why couldn’t they correctly update the flight status to show the potential delay so that we could’ve hung around the Lounge a bit longer? They would’ve known about the delay potentially as soon as it left Port Macquarie, or at least mid-flight.
We boarded, and I had 1F. My original seat selection on the original flight was 2A as I don’t like row 1 with the tray-table in the arm rests: it’s a bit of a pain to work with when you’re trying to juggle laptops and possibly get up and down etc. How come my original seat selection on the original flight didn’t flow through to the new flight? (row 2 was vacant)
Once we boarded, we waited, and then waited some more, and then got an announcement from the Pilot that they had a fail-to-board pax with luggage, and so they had to retrieve the bags. We were really feeling that the day was a comedy-of-errors by this stage.
We finally arrived in CBR around 13:30-14:00 and got to our meetings. Got through part of what we needed to, and then headed off at 16:00 to head back to catch the 17:00 flight to SYD.
Flight was slightly delayed there as well – operating aircraft was pulling in after the advertised boarding time, and once again, no update to the flight status on the displays. However, this meant we got to enjoy a beverage in the Lounge at CBR anyway, and considering the day we’d had, this was a welcome retreat.
On boarding the CBR flight, the CSM appeared somewhat stressed, and possibly didn’t realise how loud her vocalisation of this stress was. I gathered from her discussion with the other FAs that they were trying to work out how they were going to deal with taking orders from a few PE pax AND deliver all the meals for Flexi-fare pax (there must’ve been quite a few, which I guess you’d expect on a flight out of CBR) AND do a cash-cart run for other pax all within the 20 minute flight time! Seems that VA has a few things to iron out on some of its shorter sectors.
They overcame the first issue by taking our PE order before the door closed, and got that ready: I would’ve been happy to grab the box of chips and put them in the back-seat pouch before take-off if that had’ve been helpful for them!
Got through to SYD without too many other dramas, and then got to enjoy the Lounge again for the evening until my 19:20 flight to CNS.
I guess I expected the flight to CNS to be full. It’s only an E90 and is often full normally, so would expect even more so as the impact of the ash cloud started to settle (pardon the pun!) So in PE, I had non-PE seated pax all around me: a group of fellas heading to CNS for a boys-weekend. That’s fine. I enjoyed talking with the fella next to me, shared my digi-player movie with him and appreciated the fact that Tourists are still heading to CNS, which we sorely need for the economy up there! Of course, other than the extra leg room, they didn’t get the PE service.
However, what disappointed me most was that my choice of drinks wasn’t available on the flight: and I was served first! I’d hate to imagine what was available by the time the cart got to the back of the plane! When I went for a walk at one stage, the CSM did apologise about the full flight and pax around me in PE (I wasn’t concerned about that). He also apologised about the limited food/drink selection and suggested that the carts are only filled up at the start of the day and whatever’s left by the end of the day, that’s it! Is this correct? Don’t they replenish stock during the day? Yes, I understand that they have their usual spiel “we apologise if your selection is not available”, but considering they *know* the flights are going to be full for getting pax moving around after the ash cloud, surely they could handle the catering much better to keep pax happier and even potentially make up for lost revenue from the previous day?
My main concern from this aspect is that I have another PE ticket booked, SYD-CNS, for Thursday this week. I was lucky that my client paid for last week’s, but this one has come out of my own pocket, and I’ve purposely chosen this product for the product and service offering, not cause I’ve got a lot of cash to splash around! I will be very disappointed if my experience turns out to be the same as this last flight.
I don’t quite feel to put in a “complaint” or “feedback” comment for any of the above, but thought I’d see what others thought of the whole experience. Did I just encounter a bad day with an unfortunate set of circumstances?
If VA are pushing more for business travel, then I’d think they’d have to improve on some of the areas above? Yes, I know they can’t control the ash cloud and its rolling affects, nor the initial fault-based delay etc. etc. but I think there are a few things they could improve on in some of the situations above. What do others think?
