Virgin changing us to an EARLIER flight with only 90 minutes notice
 

Virgin is succeeding where the greenies have failed - they are discouraging people from flying.

Ironic for an industry which has requested and received so much taxpayer support the last few years.

Monday 30/5/22, my relatives were returning from SYD to MEL having flown up the Sunday for a Monday morning funeral.
They were booked on VOZ898 departing SYD at 2200, so we had some time together after the funeral.
At 1830, we get an email advising that 898 has been cancelled, and have been moved to VOZ888 departing at 2000. From our location, we could not make that flight which was to start boarding only 1 hour after the email was sent!
We called Virgin, and endured a (predictably) long hold. It was "explained" that the weather in MEL meant flight arrivals late yesterday evening had been cancelled. A quick check of FlightAware showed that was a lie.
We were then told that we could catch a later flight from SYD to Gold Coast, and then a flight from Gold Coast to MEL. So a plane could apparently fly into MEL late last night after all - so long as the plane had warmed up in Queensland before flying to MEL.
We then asked Virgin to transfer us to the 2200 Qantas flight which was still scheduled and showing capacity. "No, we can't do that."
[size=13px]So we had no choice but to paid $600 last minute for 3 seats one-way on the 2200 Qantas flight. If we couldn't make the 2000 flight, Virgin said the only alternative was to stay in SYD last night and return this morning.[/size]

We then discovered that the 2000 VOZ888 had departed SYD at 2200 (at the scheduled time for VOZ898). This seemed curious in light of previous information that Wx had caused the cancellation of VOZ898.

It's impossible to speak with anyone, and you are left on hold with "longer than usual wait times."

Not good enough Virgin. Not nearly good enough.

Sounds like the weather was causing aircraft to run behind schedule.
The 2200 would have been too late for Sydney curfew. So cancelled.
They offered you the only available one left at 2000 scheduled. You couldn’t make it. So they offered you via Gold Coast or the next day. Not sure what you want?

This is a pilot rumour forum. Not a passenger have a whinge forum. Go complain on social media where someone from the company can actually address your concerns.

Yeah, get off here mate, or show us your pilots licence to confirm access where you can then whinge to your hearts content.

That would be good in theory. Unfortunately Virgin have not replied to repeated emails nor phone calls. Nor has Jayne. Hence my post.

You pilots may as well know what your front of house looks like. It sucks.

A quick look at anyone of several product review sites demonstrates this is a wider business failing - not an isolated weather issue.

Replying to above
If they had said the 2200 was cancelled and we were rebooked on the 2000 - which will be running late..... no problem.
However they insisted we be at airport by 1920 for the 2000 - which then departed at 2200.

You would understand the problem if it happened to you.

Businesses that don't understand their customers often become ex-businesses.

Virgin: Been there, done that.

It sounds frustrating, but what can they do better other than answer the phone more quickly? (Which is one of my pet peeves, especially banks...) They can't book you on Qantas, and may not have know the 2000 would depart 2200. Only thing I can see is maybe pay airport hotel for catching the next days flight, I've had that a couple of times on internationals but it's a stretch on domestic.

Clearly you have no idea around the disruptions being caused in SE Australia due to the westerlies. If you were an aviation professional in any capacity, you would. I concur with the others, find a more appropriate platform to air your grievances.

It's not an issue of Wx disruptions. It is about communication.

Anyway as you say I am not a pilot. I am a critical care physician (who devoted significant time on these pages in early 2020 trying to explain what was coming down the pike). I use to be a DAME (that juice wasn't worth the squeeze), and also served with RAAF SR. I have many pilot friends (both QF and VA) with whom I sympathised during a long and uncertain furlough. So I believe I have slightly more than a passing everyday familiarity with aviation operations.

The airline front of house sucks. Don't blame me if it drags you down.

Anyway I'll leave you to it. At least I got more responses in 2 hours here than in 2 weeks from VA "customer service."

80 per cent of my family and close friends’ circle are in health varying in roles from consultants to nursing to OTs and physios. According to your reasoning, I should be able to pass judgement on their professions and workplace without rebuke. Do I? No. Do they on my profession? No.
You sound like a typical boomer senior doctor/consultant/surgeon (which my friends hate) that thinks the world revolves around them. Accept that sh*t happened on the day that wasn’t ideal, and most of all, it wasn’t personal.

One of the long term consequences of Covid has been an increasingly polarised and intolerant society. We are more divided on age, ethnicity, SES, profession.... than previously. Divide and conquer.

Your missing the point or creating a strawman - I'm not sure which.
I accept Wx cancellations if that is what it was
I wasn't passing judgement on a pilots decision to divert, or to reject a runway due to excessive x-wind, or any other operational decision. Never have and never will.
I was saying that it is piss poor for an airline to send an email (which you may not receive) at 1830 advising you that your flight is departing at 2000 instead of 2200. And it is.

Would I expect you to pass judgement on my clinical skills? Not really as you aren't a SME.
Would I expect you to pass judgement if my receptionist was inefficient, rude and dismissive? Sure, as this complaint falls within the purview of the lay public.

One sad legacy about 9/11 is that is has encouraged many (not all) airline personnel to see pax as complainers and potential threats - not paying customers. That attitude is a slippery slope that doesn't end well.

Awwwwwww!!!!!

Poor didums.....!!!!!

why don't you take the bus? I think your more suited for that......
or even better.. go take Jet*

Crikey - cut the guy some slack!

I cant say I blame him - being told to move to a flight two hours earlier with only 90 minutes notice kind of sucks, particularly in Sydney where the travel times can make that sort of change near on impossible.

If it was me who had my flight changed like that I would be a tad annoyed - though I would have angled for them to pay accom for the night.

Calm you arrogance dude.

Pilot or not all he is commenting on is appalling customer service and the really sad news is that the other lot are no better.

Could be wrong, but I suspect that tossbag was taking the piss! But thanks to you and DHdriver for speaking up - I'm of the view that the OP's "whinge" was quite appropriate (although the SLF forum may have been more appropriate) and some of the replies from "professional pilots" were disappointing to this SLF who also has a long-term history with, and interest in, the aviation world.

Many of us had the backs of pilots during periods of nasty treatment by Head Offices - is a bit of respect in return too much to ask?

Edit: Sorry, replying to the post by a_ross84.

Slats, thanks for your post, apologies for those “professional pilots” disrespectfull replies

You're preaching to the choir man! We have to deal with this level of monumental incompetence on a daily basis. We're quite often finishing shifts many hours late, and whilst this doesn't usually impact us financially as directly as it did in your scenario, it's extremely disruptive to our lives and families, which is priceless really.

In a way, I envy passengers like your family who only get screwed over once in a blue moon.

Of course none of this excuses the treatment of your family. I'd be well pissed off in their situation as well.

Apologies for some of the more uncouth replies.

I am sure the OP just needed to vent. It's a pretty poor show by the airline to suddenly shift a booking with little time to rearrange plans.
Do you have access to a financial advise column in a newspaper? Often they can get a much better and faster response than by going through the so-called official channels which appear to be designed to dissuade people from making legitimate claims. Failing that, there's Twitter.

Absolutely a waste of time whinging here. No one at virgin cares and to be honest neither do the pilots who work there.

Look at all the Virgin pilots telling Slats to pull his head in. Fark off. You're a bunch of d!cks. I am a professional pilot which apparently you have to be to comment here. And I travel a lot as pax for my duties. No airline FARKS me around more than VA. It is a **** airline, end of story.

Media today reporting big delays at check in due long weekend. That is totally ops normal for VA. Do self serve check in, then line up for 50 minutes just to do bag drop. What a **** fight. Never differs. So many of my flights get cancelled, QF love to do that too.

Go for your life guys, shoot me down, but I'm with slats -
​​​​****, low cost, bottom shelf, poor excuse for an airline.

​​​​​

Slats11 is almost a 100% correct. His error was in narrowing it down to just Virgin when really it’s the entire industry which makes it their mission to piss off as many passengers as possible.

Must just be the new bully boy Aussie way of customer service, who can forget the QF CEO berating his customers for not being “match fit” because his check in/baggage handling operation was incompetent. Blame the customer and keep beating them up. North Korea has a lot to learn from Australia when it comes to the mistreating of customers.

Some of the unhinged vitriol here reaffirms my suspicion that many in the community are not doing particularly well. I can not recall society's resilience being this low. This is an international phenomenon - friends and professional colleagues around the world assure me it is the same everywhere..

If it was a routine business meeting that got screwed around at the end of the day, yeah OK. That happens. Deal with it.

Family members had come up to Sydney for a funeral that Monday. We had decided to have an early dinner together in Sydney before I dropped them to the airport for a flight back home. Something more pleasant after a pretty ordinary day. They all had work commitments in Melbourne on Tuesday morning. Instead of catching up for dinner, we spent the time trying to get through to VA and then rebooking flights on QF.

Perhaps it was unrealistic to plan on them catching last flight back and being able to work the next day. But we have long all taken air travel for granted, and so had hoped things were getting back to normal.

The unilateral nature of the communication was infuriating - an email from an unmonitored address, and an hour on hold.

I suspect what happened is that Wx during the day meant the 2200 wasn't able to operate. Both the 2000 and the 2200 were significantly light that they could get all pax onto one flight. If they could contact all the 2200 pax and get them there early, then the flight could leave earlier than 2200 - which would be a shorter delay for those on the 2000 flight.
That sort of makes sense.
I presume not all the 2200 pax saw the email, turned uo for the 2200 flight, and all they noted was a change in flight number. Pays not to read email.

Anyway, I'm working all 3 days this weekend.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/...03-p5aqtj.html

So don't get sick or injured.
The problem now isn't C19. Its all the latent problems that have been exposed by C19. The workforce is now burnt out and disillusioned after 30 months of this. And they are starting to walk away.

Meanwhile, many office workers in both the corporate and government sector are enjoying their work:life balance and WFH and saying "we should have done this years ago." Customer service is at an all time low, as exemplified by VA here.

We are not all in this together, and that is a key reason society is splintering.

And things are just getting started. More supply chain disruptions, stagflation, rising interest rates, wages falling behind, increasing geopolitical uncertainty, and a polarised fragmented angry society. Good luck Albo - you are going to need it. In spades.

Nice measured response Slats; shame some of earlier responding egos couldn’t get over themselves. Trevor and a few others summed it up nicely though - the industry is pretty stuffed but there are some awesome individuals still plugging away with total professionalism.

The regulators are planning on looking at airlines and customer protections later this year, is much that needs to come from that, management will be jumping up and down claiming business will be unviable as they now need to actually look after passengers. We probably need to go down the path like the EU, customer receives significant compensation should they be inconvenienced. At that point they generally see how much they have underinvested in scheduling and rostering software, many scheduling problems arise from poor planning.

All are equally as bad. My own employer has screwed me over on one occasion so much I emailed the said boss who then apologized and offered me a cash compensation. To Virgin’s credit, on the one occasion they cancelled and offered very few options, I asked for them to send me half way across the country to then reconnect to the destination, they happily did that.

Anyone from VA able to confirm this story? Surely not.

https://www.afr.com/rear-window/no-h...0220425-p5afzk

Yes thats true.
Also true was that last prize was two lunches with that Woman.

From what I've been told, it's true. Sounds a tad tone def but seems to be getting the results her superiors are after.

Qantas is no better promising flights every 1/2 hour to Sydney then cancelling with up to 2 hours or more disruption . Not to mention changing terminals when Jetstar cancel and you're shuffled to Qantas or vise versa.

no dog in the fight but, this thread:

*MASH music starts, in choppers Qantas Angels & shareholders*

It was sarcasm d!ckhead.

My boss always reminded his pilots that their paymaster was the passenger and not the boss, maybe that should be kept in mind when criticizing customers who have less that satisfactory customer service. On reading some of the comments on this forum over the years I suspect that " professional pilot" in some cases describes a personal who is paid for their work and nothing beyond that.

Hi Slats.

I’ve no doubt the childish responses here have affirmed that you made the right decision by working in medicine rather than aviation :rolleyes:

Regrettably, I chose the opposite to you and have lifelong regret.

Your situation with VA sounds sh*t. But it’s not abnormal, or isolated to Virgin. All Australian airlines have these problems, and Qantas seem the worst of the lot atm. All Australian airlines are a sh*t show.

No baggage handlers, understaffed engineering, crap communication, joke call centres - and most importantly management who ignore these issues and just walk away with their bonuses.

They really are ignorant to how pissed off people are - but as tech crew, we can’t change it. We don’t control culture, or honesty, or customer service. And most of us who are professional pilots are very embarrassed by it all.

I have a friend who called me last week. She’s had her Japan flights cancelled 5 times in the last 3 years. Each time, she has spent 8 hours on hold trying to rebook with her credit as they refused a refund. Last week, despite saying she desperately wanted to support an Australian carrier, she booked with Air Japan and says she will never travel with an Australian airline again. I asked what would need for her to change that opinion and she said “when I don’t have to spend 40 hours on hold while simultaneously watching a news article on the airline’s CEO buying a new $19m property in Sydney, I’ll think about it.”

Yes it’s bad. And yes it’s going to get worse before it gets better. Most of my colleagues think Australia is closer to a big airline hull loss than its ever been before. The Swiss cheese is lining up. Loading errors. Baggage carts driven into fuselages. Pilots running 2-3 hours late and fatigued every single day because there’s a 20 knot westerly in Sydney or no tug drivers in Melbourne.

If nothing else, I’m glad you were able to attend the funeral and spend time with your family.

As a pilot who has been flying for >50 years I don't understand why I'm able to handle a 30-35 knot crosswind in Canberra and Brisbane, but due to ATC requirements, I'm considered unable to handle anything greater than 20 knots in Sydney and Melbourne.
Time for Airservices Australia (Service, now there's an oxymoron) to stop this ridiculous situation that leads to major delays throughout the entire airline network, that's all airlines.
Give me 25-30 knots of crosswind on runway 34L&R any day rather than the mechanical turbulence that is generated on approach to runway 25 in those conditions.

The government won't agree to that as they are part of the problem. Curfews, ridiculous rule set, poor ATC hamstrung by stupid rules, lack of infrastructure etc etc

Oi VC9, the galahs would only offer you the 30kt crosswind if you were OEI.

Previously they used to make it available if you wanted it and would slot you in behind the arrivals on 25 but now that's to dangerous. As you say it's only available in an emergency....:ugh:

Prescient. If you want the big bucks, then the buck stops with you.

Wow. I am genuinely gobsmacked at some of the responses on here to what is a perfectly reasonable complaint.

Sounds like some of you legends forget who pays your wages.

I suggest you make yourself familiar with this piece of legislation as it is the core of the original complaint: https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2021C00045

That may explain the root cause of the problem, but it doesn’t explain the extraordinary responses from some of the so called professionals on here.