LHR planes filling in on the LGW 747 refit ?

I heard a rumour today that the 747 LGW refit had started and that we may see the LGW Barbados and Jamaican flights being swapped for LHR aircraft. Lady Penelope currently on the LGW Barbados run is usually an LHR plane ?

Can anyone confirm if this is true and how likely will it be for a Montego Bay plane (Tuesday or Saturday) to be a refurbed LHR plane in November.

Barbados uses a Heathrow configured plane sometimes because Upper seats can be a strong seller. If / when there are more substitutions, i would guess that routes with a greater potential for more sales in upper will be used.

Don't know how strong the upper seats sell to Montego bay, but there are often on sale meaning they are not selling well.

It will be interesting to see how Virgin manage all the issues associated with these updates

David

Hi David, The loads on my dates are fullin economy on the way out and full in upper on the way back (dec) so you never know. The rumour suggested that they are linking the refits with the "service" for the aircraft and that they had already started so fingers xssed.

Any rumour that the refits have started now is a load of round objects !

They are not due to start until spring next year and all the info in the VS website and FB page points to that.

Whilst an earlier re-fit date would no doubt suit a lot of people I honestly can't see VS bringing forward these plans due to the dusruption it would cause (cue hundreds of threads complaining about seat changes!)

Tony Bear - let me down gently!

only a rumour then...

Hi David, The loads on my dates are fullin economy on the way out and full in upper on the way back (dec) so you never know. The rumour suggested that they are linking the refits with the "service" for the aircraft and that they had already started so fingers xssed.

Hi Lily,

I think the good news (apart from the refits themselves) is the "potential" for more Upper sales out of LGW.

They are replacing 14 upper seats with 40+ of the LHR fleet when they substitute these planes in, so surely this is a great opportunity to "introduce" more people to Upper, especially with the extra investment VS is putting into that product, and give us some really keen prices to fill these temporary extra seats. y)

David

David

Looks like the VS29/30 BGI flight has been using an LHR 747 in the past few days 'G-VFAB' whixch isn't that uncommon for the Barbados route as its been known in the past for an LHR 747 to be used on the route at times.

My guess would be that today the VS34 (ANU-LGW) was meant to arrive into LGW this morning at 05:30 but is showing to be expected at 23:00 so would guess VS have replaced the Jamaican route with an LHR 747 for today.

I believe (and stand to be corrected) but the LGW-Barbados flight normally operates as an LHR 747 during the UK winter... ( during the UK summer it is used on the US routes).

I dont believe (based on the limited info we have internally) there are any plans to use it on the MBJ route.