upgrading to uc through virgin holidays

Please could virgin holiday make it clear to their customer, that trying to upgrade to uc for my family of four seems impossible as they only give them two seats in this class, i have been trying with numerous phone calls to sort this as its my wifes birthday when we fly 17th may 2006 to orlando, we are already in pe as we normally do but this would nice to surprise my family, you would think this would be possible ?.

[Decker]

Given that it is a LGW config with only 14 UC seats this isn't surprising given they use specific fare codes. There ARE Z seats left on both flights for those days so perhaps you can ask about whether they can buy these on your behalf?

Been there Done that got the damn T Shirt. I did the same for the end of Aug. It took my TA almost 2 days permanantly on the phone to the 'call-centre' to get it sorted out. I have complained about the CC in another thread, but VH are normally good at this sort of thing. Are you frequent Virgins? if you are it might be worth using the FV phone line and see if they can help.

why not just buy 4 "Z"s from VA and book your hotel seperate on your own? Cancel the VH one in any case its £800 extra in total to upgrade
each with VH, if you book a hotel direct you pay one price for the room as opposed to a VH per person price, it can work out about £1000
cheaper in the long run.

[preiffer]

To me, the word "upgrade" automatically implies an element of risk. ie: you MIGHT not be able to. [:0]

Although E.G.G.'s suggestion is a very good one, from the tone of your original post, I'm assuming this trip is already booked and paid for?


From my perspective (and not meaning to sound hard, as I appreciate you're trying to do this as a surprise), if you KNOW you want to sit in Upper Class, you buy an Upper Class ticket to begin with.

If you're willing to add a little bit of risk (and an upgrade to J on a 14-config aircraft is certainly a risk), then you go the upgrade route. This added risk is unfortunately a fact of life when it comes to airline travel. When you've sat with the other 50 people trying to get their "confirmed upgrades" processed on an International UA flight with only 5 seats in C left, you'll appreciate that upgrades are not a certain bet .


There are only two ways to guarantee a seat in Upper:

1. Pay for an Upper Class ticket in the first place
2. Use Flying Club miles to either upgrade or "pay" for a seat at the time of booking (providing there's space, of course, and this won't work on VH tickets as we know)


Having said that -
Decker's suggestion is a good avenue to go down at this point. If you know there's availability in Z (Which is what VH book into), you could always call VH with this information and ask them to speak to VS directly.

Thankfully I was one of the lucky ones - I managed to book us 2 UC flights as soon as the new brochure came out. My 2 friends also tried to book but were advised there were only 2 seats allocated to VH per Orlando flight. I didn't quite believe it so went online and had a play - if you select 2 passengers if UC is available the UC option shows, however if you put more than 2 passengers you only get the economy and PE option. Unfortunately despite numerous phone calls VH wouldn't budge so they're going to try and get 2 'cheap' UC fares as soon as they are released.

Well,
If you can get two UC seats and not the four, get the two to sit in the PE just behind and you two (or whatever combination) take the two available UC seats.

I would also check the availability of UC seats on you flight anyway

@nmurrell - I'm interested in the outcome. We are in the same situation, although flying over a year away. I wanted 4 UC seats but the VH site was only allowing 2. However, I could quite happily book 4 for earlier dates. When I asked VH why I was having problems they told me that they only have an initial allocation of 2 and can't ask for any more until 11 months before departure. She implied that requesting (and securing) the extra seats at that time would not be a problem. Anyway, to cut a long story short, we have booked the holiday flying PE and VH will request the UC seats as soon as they can. They have said that if they can't secure the UC seats for us then they'll refund our deposit in full.

So...if they can't get the seats is there any difference in cost if we book those UC seats with VA ?

So did you ever get your 4 UC seats through VH ? I'm in the same position.

the girls at the fv club really help me out and got me the 4 seats i wanted this took many phone calls but as this was to be a surprise for my wifes birthday they spoke to virgin atlantic for me,i think we are very good customers having been with virgin holidays many time spending lots of money staying at the best disney hotels and always flying pe. Hope this helps

Originally posted by ric
So did you ever get your 4 UC seats through VH ? I'm in the same position.