Subj:Bonnie and Gwen Show
Date:26/07/02 19:52:26 GMT Daylight Time
From:Tony.mcauley@thenewsmarket.comTo:VirginLies@aol.com
Sent from the Internet
I was booked on VF10, June 27, flying to London for a brief visit with my
young daughter. Departure scheduled for 11.10 p.m. I arrived and joined a
huge check-in line at 8.30 p.m. There were no signs and no announcements.
Queue didn't move for at least 20 minutes - one passenger began to spread
the word that the flight would be delayed for many hours. It took just over
two hours to reach the check-in -- at this point, the Virgin person
explained that the plane had had to be sent to Dublin to be fixed and my
flight would not take off until sometime the next morning. He gave me a $15
voucher and a letter to get 20% off the next flight I might purchased from
Virgin. He explained that extremely slow check-in line was because they were
re-booking all the connecting passengers at ALL of the "Economy" windows,
which averaged at least 20 minutes per customer. All us passengers -
economy, anyway - spent the night on the airport floor and the plane finally
took off about 7 a.m. next morning. The flight back from London was delayed
also, getting me into Newark after 1 a.m., with work the next day. My whole
four-day visit was shortened to three days, and I had severe jetlag from the
overnight airport floor experience.I wrote all this to customer relations in the U.S. immediately after getting
back and got a standard letter saying somone would get in touch. Four weeks
later, I phoned customer relations U.S. and got Bonnie Kohler. I wanted to
get a ticket for my daughter to come to New York from Dublin next month.
Bonnie said normally I could only use the discount for a ticket for myself,
but "as a gesture" they would offer me the following: a roundtrip ticket,
via London, for $974 for my daughter. I could then mail in the discount
letter and get $150 voucher and use this against this ticket (how was not
made clear). I would then get the ticket mailed to me and have to mail it to
my daughter, as they could not mail it to her directly. But if I wanted to
set up a "pre-pay" (don't I always "pre-pay?"), she could get ticketed at
the airport in Dublin, and this would cost me just $50. So, $1,024 for the
ticket.On Expedia, for the same departure and return dates Air Canada was offering
$620, British Airways $682.Bonnie's manager, Gwen Briggs, refused to take my call to discuss this.
Bonnie wrote me an email later to say she'd discussed all this with Gwen and
they'd both decided that they were sticking with their position, should I
like to take up their offer.