Virgin Atlantic relaunches flights to Mumbai after a four year gap

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• Michael says:

  21 May21 May 12:58

  Was wondering where the 3rd article was 😀

  • Rob says:

    21 May21 May 13:31

    3rd article was the Iberia one from yesterday afternoon. This is the first Wednesday article 🙂

    • Charlieface says:

      21 May21 May 20:44

      Seems to be happening rather regularly now. Wonder when the first time there’ll be a full set from the day before. Not that I’m bothered, I don’t wait for the emails anyway.

      • Rob says:

        21 May21 May 22:13

        We only do it on news articles where we think the story is ‘closed’ (ie no new facts will emerge throughout the day) or where it is a limited time offer.

• tartan says:

  21 May21 May 13:11

  Glad to see that they are running a daytime flight outward bound, but will stick with BA as they also run two daytime flights back to the UK

• Kiran says:

  21 May21 May 13:44

  Wonder if they can make it work this time. I believe this is the second relaunch in less than 10 years. Timings don’t work so well for me as I prefer BA’s evening LHR departure which gets in to BOM around lunchtime and then BOM lunchtime departure which gets into LHR in the evening (after the rush hour) which is pretty easy on the jet-lag (and allows me to travel down to LHR after work to catch the outbound) but I can appreciate that these timings may work better for some.

• JamesLHR says:

  21 May21 May 14:26

  “Virgin Atlantic has a codeshare and partnership agreement with Jet Airways before it collapsed, and the airline clearly believes that the demand exists for a dedicated Virgin Atlantic service.”

  Working in Terminal 4 for an airline, with a similar transfer profile but from Air Canada, I can assure you there were masses of passengers connecting from DL/VS to 9W at LHR. We are talking into the hundreds a day and for 9W the vast majority were N.American connections.

  It is a current theme at LHR of where have these passengers gone to? AI have increased capacity with aircraft upgrades (size), BA and VS have direct connections and then others are dispersed across the various non direct carriers and now on 3 sector journeys.

  It makes sense for DL/VS to keep the money in house and they have visibility of the volume and fares from the tickets previously sold.

  • Kiran says:

    21 May21 May 15:25

    This makes more sense about the flight timings – depart LHR after the early US flights arrive and arrive back in time to connect onto a ot of US-bound departures.

    • John says:

      22 May22 May 10:37

      I don’t understand who wants to arrive in India at 1am. Or why any Indians in the US want to connect through the UK when any Schengen connection is much easier.

      • Chris says:

        22 May22 May 15:17

        I do, for one. I can relax on the plane during the day, fall into a BOM airport hotel, wake whenever I want, before onward travel the following day.

        • tartan says:

          22 May22 May 15:54

          I’ve just booked onto the BA flight that lands just before midnight. I can stay at an airport hotel and get a few hours sleep before continuing my journey to Pune by car. I never sleep well on planes so this is a much better option for me

• Brian says:

  21 May21 May 20:31

  OT – Amex Platinum Insurance

  From my understanding, we are required to use the Platinum Card to pay for the trip to get the following protections:

  Cancelling, Postponing and Abandoning your Trip
  Cutting Short your Trip
  Travel Inconvenience
  Personal Belongings, Money and Travel Documents
  Purchase Protection
  Refund Protection

  But is there a specific requirement as to what needs to be paid with the Amex Platinum or does the entire trip needs to be paid with it?

  It would be quite obvious that for trip delays, it will be required for us to pay for the transportation using the Amex Platinum, but what about Personal Belonging? How much of ‘the trip’ is required to be paid on the Amex Plat in order for the customer to be protected?

• Steve says:

  22 May22 May 06:59

  For anyone who is thinking of applying for the 30,000 virgin card and holds the free one I was rejected (strong credit history, high earner etc). Virgin have advised that they changed the policy and new applicants can no longer hold both. I have appealed on the basis I will be cancelling the existing card and can put additional spend through it. I expect to hear back in 30 days….

  • Alan says:

    22 May22 May 08:19

    Interesting, thanks. I wonder whether anyone has told the Virgin Money Twitter team as they were certainly advocating that you could hold both.

  • Alan says:

    22 May22 May 08:22

    Just checked their Twitter page and they still seem to be saying that you can hold both (but you can’t have applied for either in the previous 6 months)

    • Alan says:

      22 May22 May 11:03

      Hmm, Twittr now confiormed you are correct. Can only hold one card at a time and, presumably, they haven’t sorted an “upgrade” route out yet so if you are using the free card you would have to cancel it, leave it for 6 months and then apply for the paid card. Definitely a lack of joined up thinking there!

      • FlyingChris says:

        22 May22 May 11:49

        This is really frustrating as I applied for the Free one earlier this year with the plan of taking out the Paid version 6 months later. With the Amex 241 about to be earned, I was planning on cancelling all my Amex cards – so looking like might need to give Virgin a rest for 6 months as well?

        • Alan says:

          22 May22 May 12:27

          It seems a very odd business plan. If you have a free card and want to “upgrade” to a paid one you need to cancel your card then wait 6 months and then hope you get accepted for the paid one! In the meantime you are driving your customer to a different card.

          Someone at VM is getting paid a lot more than they should be!

• Heathrow Flyer says:

  22 May22 May 07:41

  Which route did they take these slots from?

  • Rob says:

    22 May22 May 08:17

    The Flybe Guernsey service will end, I believe

    • Dev says:

      22 May22 May 10:25

      Also Jet Airways had 3 flights a day on the LHR-BOM route, in addition to their flights to DEL. Three pairs of slots were taken back by Etihad, so speculation on other blogs suggests that Virgin already had this slot and had let Jet Airways use it for the third flight to BOM. They are apparently going to utilise it now, claimed an insider who commented on the OMAAT blog last night.

      • Rob says:

        22 May22 May 10:27

        It is also possible they are leasing it off Etihad. My understanding is that EY does not want to run 5 flights per day from Heathrow, at least not without a decent run-up. You’ll note that the Etihad service expansion we discussed recently only covers the Summer period to 26th October. We have no idea what EY is planning with its 2 extra slots from 27th October (the 3rd went to Air Serbia).

        • JamesLHR says:

          22 May22 May 15:08

          9W and DL did a slot swap on the 18th March for S19 period. That was the slots for the 9W115/116 going to DL for a 78 seat aircraft from T2 (BE flight).

          DL and VS trade amongst themselves with their slots, so its probably a shuffle.

• nick says:

  22 May22 May 10:19

  would love for them to bring back the Cape Town flight!!

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