New virgin-atlantic.com website release (update 29/02/12)

[Scrooge]

As a critic of the current site, I have to say, what a massive improvement oo)

I have been less and less impressed with the old site but this appears to have addressed many of the problems. It looks promising y)

A big thumbs up from me y) . A clean and fresh makeover. Navigation is a lot easier than the old site & I particularly like the flight connections section.

I can't wait for the full roll out.

Well done.

Oh wow!! I do like the new site. It is so clean looking and so easy to navigate. The new baggage section is really easy to use. When I clicked on the Flying Club section, it was quite a shock to see the old site in comparison to the new one. Well done - this is a vast improvement & I'm looking forward to the next section revamp.

Katie

I think it all needs to be up now, I agree that now that part of the new website is there, the old one looks even more outdated, and could be quite confusing for new customers who are not familiar with the site

I think it all needs to be up now, I agree that now that part of the new website is there, the old one looks even more outdated, and could be quite confusing for new customers who are not familiar with the site

It's not the end of the world, there aren't broken links from what I see. I'm sure people will understand it's a refresh in progress. bmi did the same when they updated their website - took roughly a month in total.

It is better, agreed.

I look forward to the improved flight booking engine very much indeed - are you able to give a clue as to whether this may give enriched functionality regarding reward bookings - miles for upgrades, Amex PE upgrade vouchers etc?

Agreed y)

Ali.

Hand baggage/Carry on states one piece of hand baggage, sorry to confuse the issue but is that including my handbag or is it my handbag plus 1 piece of hand luggage?

Hand baggage/Carry on states one piece of hand baggage, sorry to confuse the issue but is that including my handbag or is it my handbag plus 1 piece of hand luggage?

It's an item of hand luggage within the specified dimensions and weight. Plus a 'personal item' which can be a laptop bag, hand bag or even a man bag 8D

Hi Everyone,

Firstly, thanks so much for all your feedback, it’s great to hear your positive comments and general satisfaction with the new pages. We’ve taken lots of notes and will endeavor to report back on individual developments as they occur.

To address some of the questions asked by members:
• Content – by the time we’ve finished the project, all site content will be 100% new. We have also chosen a new CMS (content management system) which allows our web editors to update content much more simply than the incumbent system.
• Staggered Release – The website redesign is being run as an Agile project, so we can release sections sooner. Unlike other airline site redevelopments where a lot of the work was completed before the first release ours is a longer term redevelopment with more, smaller, incremental changes.
• Two designs, one site – Thanks for the feedback on whether having two design concepts across one site will be more confusing to use. It was a concern we had during development but extensive user testing showed that the large majority of customers were OK with it, even through a payment journey. If you look at sites like the BBC they co-exist multiple different creative styles, so we’re not alone in doing things this way.
• Flying Club – Flying Club pages are not scheduled until further into the project, however our redeveloped vtravelled site is due for launch towards the end of this year and we’re sure our FC members will see big changes at that time.
• Booking Engine – I think we can promise spectacular improvement in the booking engine, although some of the requests made here are unfortunately outside of the scope of a website redevelopment project, we’ll pass them on to the right people. Release date we have to keep under wraps for now.
• Background image failing to display –Safari 5.1 is a very new browser and came in too late in the development of the first release, but it’s been fed back to the developers and they’ll look into it. The same issue also impacts certain versions of Google Chrome.
• Adding a date and time last published – nice idea, we’ll add it to the project backlog and get it in a release soon.
• Airport content – Thanks for the ideas around how airport content could be improved. This section will be released soon and we’ll work with our colleagues at the airports to get as much useful info into this as possible.

I will continue to post update summaries and links to all our future releases in the forums, so thanks again for your continued support and feedback.

Kyle.

Fergus, Kyle, Greg & Howard

Many thanks for giving us the heads up on the new site. It looks excellent and is a vast improvement on the old one. As many others have said, when you link back to an "old" page the shock is real and the contrast makes it look really dated.

It worked well on my Blackberry Torch too (I'm not an Apple fanboy like many others).

I can understand the gradual site changeover rather than a big bang approach (from a technical and resources perspective), but lets hope that the complete upgrade is completed in a short time and does not linger for months with a dual identity. I'm sure that it will confuse some new visitors to the site. Maybe you should have a brief note somewhere on the pages explaining the upgrade is in process and the new look will be complete by dd/mm/yy like you did when T3 was being (physically) facelifted. It would help people understand the WIP dual look.

A speeded up booking engine is a must too. Compared to other airlines the current system appears creaky and slow.

Well done and thanks for asking for V-Flyer input. Its a small thing but makes us, as customers, feel valued and inclusive.

Cheers

Martin

Hand baggage/Carry on states one piece of hand baggage, sorry to confuse the issue but is that including my handbag or is it my handbag plus 1 piece of hand luggage?

It's an item of hand luggage within the specified dimensions and weight. Plus a 'personal item' which can be a laptop bag, hand bag or even a man bag 8D

It looks like, as well as changing the style and nav, the rules have changed a little too.

It used to say that in addition to your carry on bag, you could take a small laptop bag. That has changed and on these new pages it now says:

"If you want to take your laptop onboard, you'll need to place it in your original hand baggage or check your hand baggage in."

That's what the LCCs do, not the full service airlines. Naughty naughty v(

Ditto to Martin's comments - well said Martin.

[mitchja]

I'd personally like to see better integration with VH and improved PNR access.

VH bookings still don't show up automatically even when a Flying Club number is entered into the PNR. I realise that VH PNR's are built differently and have a manual work around to get them to show the booking before it's actually e-ticketed, but it's still a pain having to manually enter the PNR everytime to look up a VH booked VS flight booking.

The same is also true for reward bookings. These don't allow FC numbers to be entered at all and so never show up automatically and I'm sorry but it looks really naff when you have a 00500500500 FC number printed on a reward booking boarding card. It also throws out any Flying Club status you may have as well.

Even Premier Team refuse point blank to enter Flying Club numbers into reward bookings.

• Booking Engine – I think we can promise spectacular improvement in the booking engine, although some of the requests made here are unfortunately outside of the scope of a website redevelopment project, we’ll pass them on to the right people. Release date we have to keep under wraps for now.


Kyle.

Kyle - I hope this will be a case of under promise and over delivery than the usual over promise and under delivery that we seam to get from VS these days.

Not that any of us are sceptics or anything!

Safari 5.1 on a Mac (running Lion 10.7) also doesn't load the background images every time either.

Guessing they have fixed it as I'm running Lion 10.7 and safari 5.1 and i could see the background image 1st time round.

Kyle

You are probbaly fed up of new suggestions (and you may have this already) but the shared lounge section needs a huge update and it would be good to have a list of facilities each lounge has so when people get there they do not get a shock about how bad some of them are.

If there are any developers lurking please take note. I'm trying to look at reward availability. When I select the flights I'm looking at I get the we're sorry... please contact FC. This is sooooo annoying (and it's been like this for days)- I want to look at several options and don't really want to be contacting FC (if flights were viewable on EF I wouldn't be having this issue). Why do VS make the reward search feature so useless ?| ??? Any plans to remedy this ??
DL

How about more of a sexy purple/lavender hue to the background? The warm brown feels a little like the Emirates site to me...

I like the sexy purples applied on the experience site...

http://experience.virgin-atlantic.com/e ... upperClass

So, one section rolled out in two months (unless I missed some) ... quick guess that there are fifty odd sections so that means the Web site will get updated by 2015 :0 !

The Passenger Information section on the website has now been updated with the new look - I think it looks great!

http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/gb/en/tr ... ation.html

Is that Steve Brookstein in the background on that webpage?

REALLY surprised that Ski Equipment doesn't get any guidance advice in the baggage section? Would have thought it would be commented on...?

REALLY surprised that Ski Equipment doesn't get any guidance advice in the baggage section? Would have thought it would be commented on...?

'Skiing, snowboarding and water skiing' seems to cover it on the 'Sports Equipment' section of the Baggage Page...

REALLY surprised that Ski Equipment doesn't get any guidance advice in the baggage section? Would have thought it would be commented on...?

'Skiing, snowboarding and water skiing' seems to cover it on the 'Sports Equipment' section of the Baggage Page...

Doh. Missed that somehow!

Got to say, the Travel Information page is truly horrendous - while some may love it, I found it one of the most truly dis-orientating pages I've EVER seen. Make sure you're sitting down when you view it, preferably strapped into a seat so you don't get nausea/vertigo/motion-sickness.

I think whoever designed that page must have been on training course for new features on a web-site building.

The good work done elsewhere on the re-design is stuffed completely by this really awful page.