warkman I am well aware of the forums you speak of. I read the sites regularly and always with a heavy heart and wondering what we can do to fix this problem. Certainly taking a crew member off the aircraft is not going to help.
One thing I must say though is that many of the complaints are related to the product rather than the crew. Its quite embarassing as a crew member handing out the trays in economy with some awful hot meal that can not even be described as it looks so bad. Then we have a poor choice of drinks in the bar carts and even worse a lack of drinks (we frequently run out). VS are the only airline I have worked for that roundtrip wines and other drinks so they are supposed to load enough product for the roundtrip but this often doesn't happen or if you have a very busy flight you can easily run out leaving little or nothing for the return flight. This should not be happening on a premium carrier and could easily be fixed by exchanging drinks carts in out ports. Heading up to J class we have a cramped cabin and although I think the food quality in J is OK the portion sizes are tiny. VS responds that pax can eat at the clubhouse before they board but many customers do not.
Some of the crew do have bad attitude. Virgin need to address this by looking at the recruitment procedure and again the pay. They seem to hire people who only want to stay a few months to a year and in the process VS spend thousands and thousands of pounds recruiting, training etc to only get back a short period of work from the crew member. If they paid better I really believe people would stay longer and VS would increase their return on investment.
Renewable energy - all for it and I can see the business potential of supplying other airlines but if VS have this money to spend then they should at least pay us a bit more.