scruickshank wrote:Hi Everyone, given that it is almost three months since the "downgrade" of the website, I'm quite surprised the lack of constant issues being posted. From my own experience, including today when no matter what I did on my iPad, I could not stop it defaulting to "Exact Dates" instead of "5 weeks" (I realise I'm expecting too much here!) it still seems to be pretty much useless.
For me, the challenge of getting the best deal and being able to search for options are what I consider to be part of the experience of booking a trip (non work related). It's just taking the whole shine off the experience, and I'm loathed to waste hours of the customer service agents time. I'm guessing they are having a torrid time. They have always been great and I do feel for them.
The company line of the IT swap over being heralded as "it did not stop a single aircraft from taking to the skies" may be, but it's not much use if they are empty?
So are we all doing the very British thing of just lying back and excepting how terrible it is and moaning as we go along? I'm just curious as to the lack of posts for the last few weeks in this thread. I'm so disappointed in the whole thing, it's like someone has taken away my hobby I've had for years. An expensive one at that. I can't be alone, but as I've posted before, even as one of the biggest ambassadors of VS, I'm really losing faith. I'm astounded a company of such scale can have the worst of websites, and with that, seemingly doing very little about it.
It does seem to be, like it or lump it.
I'm going to give it another month or so "putting up with it" then I'm pretty sure that's another Au they are gonna lose. Anyone else got that empty feeling of being led along for years hoping to get 10yrs of Au then the T&C's being changed at the last minute? If even the strongest supporters are losing faith, then the average Joe's must just be giving up at the first hurdle. I've even found small short cuts to make the website work. Even some of them haven't lasted. Should it really come to that?
They will realise the effects eventually, but it will all be too late by then sadly. Think in 18mths we will all get an email asking to come back?
Hmmmmm.
S
I'm very much in your camp, S, and I agree with every word you write.
I have been Au for 8 years and fiercely loyal since I joined "Virgin Freeway" in 1997, as Flying Club was then called. The current fiasco is such a huge dissappointment and makes the whole online interaction with Virgin Atlantic a painful and depressing process. The "product" is still very good when you finally get to the airport and on a plane, but it is getting progressively harder to do that with the new website and systems. Add to that all the FC woes with difficuty logging in, missing miles, missing tier points and changing TP years, it is a sorry state of affairs.
My other problem is lack of routes and codeshare partners. I recently went to Australia (Brisbane) booked directly on Singapore; and I'm booking to go to Indonesia on Cathay Pacific (all in J), because VS have few useful airline partnerships. I tried hard to use Virgin metal through HKG, but there are no options. Delta is only good if you want the USA.
I'm very pleased I used VS for Sydney, Tokyo, Mumbai and Hong Kong while they were still available, but I can't see their Eastbound routes lasting much longer. The slow steady decline in VS's eastbound routes, driven IMO by the competiton from Emirates, Etihad, Qatar et al will only get worse. They can't compete on flexibility or price with an airline who wants to fill its huge fleet of A380s.
I'm sad because I've been a huge fan of VS over the years, but once I have used up my remaining 650,000 FC miles, I can't see that I'll fly them again. Its just too hard and I want to visit places other than the USA. I'll probably dump my VS credit cards too.
It really does seem as if they don't care about their customers - and that is a huge shame. (I actually suspect there are people in Crawley Towers who do care passionately, but the IT team and executive management are unable to sort out this sorry mess in a timely fashion).
scruickshank wrote:They will realise the effects eventually, but it will all be too late by then sadly. Think in 18mths we will all get an email asking to come back?
Hmmmmm.
S
I don't think that will happen, S. They would have to be able to do a "mailmerge" of an email with a list of addresses and that is clearly beyond the capability of anyone in VS IT dept
!
Martin