Gatwick North move

One flight on January 17th to Barbados is going from the North terminal prior to the full move on 25th.
Anyone on it to give us a report?


Upper Class customers flying on the VS29 on 17 January will be the first to experience our brand new Clubhouse in the North Terminal. We’re looking forward to welcoming you to our fabulous new facilities.

Dick D

Presumably with very reduced staffing as the old one will still be open!

Sounds like a bit of a soft opening to me..

Makes sense. BA have been doing the same - several test flights are operating before official move day. Although I don't believe their lounges are open yet.

yes soft opening / staff training opportunity.

It's due to be a 747 so max 14 in UC plus whatever AUs in PE/Y so not many people in total but enough to get an idea of service flow etc etc

In some ways this seems a bit pointless - especially given the proximity of The Office (VS Head Office) to Gatwick. Virgin have a lot of staff very nearby they could use to do as many soft-opening tests on the new Clubhouse as they want to. Offer staff a free meal and drink & you'll get useful feedback, with zero chance of any complaints if things do go wrong.

It's only similar to what we used to do when I worked at a theme park many moons ago. A week before opening day, every staff member got 5 free tickets for friends/family & the park operated as normal for a 4hr soft-opening. Run everything at normal capacity to bed the rides / staff in a bit, all with customers who will not complain.

Any pics available online yet?

In some ways this seems a bit pointless - especially given the proximity of The Office (VS Head Office) to Gatwick. Virgin have a lot of staff very nearby they could use to do as many soft-opening tests on the new Clubhouse as they want to. Offer staff a free meal and drink & you'll get useful feedback, with zero chance of any complaints if things do go wrong.

Testing the Clubhouse is only a small part of it though. The main objective is to test all the terminal operations - check in systems, ground handling, baggage etc. And to do that effectively you need a real flight with real, paying passengers. Which is what they're doing and what BA are doing. If that gives them the chance to dry run the Clubhouse, well that's an added bonus.

And while you'll certainly get some useful feedback from staff, it's far better to get it from real customers. Things that may be blindingly obvious to staff may be very confusing to someone who's never flown before, so their feedback is just as valuable if not more so.

I'm sure Heathrow could have found enough staff and their friends & family to test T2 before it opened in 2015 but they chose instead to recruit public volunteers. As well as all the feedback gathered from a huge variety of "passengers", the free publicity they got via social media and word of mouth would have been extremely valuable.

BA used BA staff volunteers for T5 testing and that worked out so well for them (if you think a Parliamentary Select Committee investigation counts as a success measure)

For example they used empty suitcases rather than one stuffed with clothes and what nots like normal passengers have so of course the flew through the baggage system without problems - unlike the real ones on opening day.

ATL used real people as volunteers prior to opening a new terminal. They looked specifically for people who hadn't flown before or only a few times so as to get the novice experience and the questions like 'what does that sign mean?' obvious to regular fliers that it means say passport control but not to everyone.

I'm sure that some VS staff have been used to pre-test things but for actually testing you need real people not insiders (oh with like the website for example ...)

BA used BA staff volunteers for T5 testing and that worked out so well for them (if you think a Parliamentary Select Committee investigation counts as a success measure)

For example they used empty suitcases rather than one stuffed with clothes and what nots like normal passengers have so of course the flew through the baggage system without problems - unlike the real ones on opening day.

BAA (as the then owner of Heathrow) certainly used public volunteers for a lot of the T5 trials - I was on two of them & I have no connection whatsoever with BA. Yes, they did use empty suitcases in the trials & some suitcases had labels on saying things like "I am a pushchair" for when a volunteers scenario said they had to have a pushchair. TBH, the two trials I did were not bad, but clearly on a very low-scale. BA's mistake was going for the "big bang" T5 move - Heathrow Airport Limited clearly learnt from this with the opening of T2 which was phased over several months.

The actual cause of a lot of the T5 day 1 calamity was due to an error by an IT provider. They messed up a list of staff usernames for the new IT system, so that the user ID next to your name was not actually yours. So staff tried to logon with "their" user ID, got a wrong username/password prompt. Tried again 2 more times and the account is locked out. So a large number of the staff who needed IT access to introduce bags into the system at check-in / handle the bags downstairs could not access the system.