This is a Trip Report from the Economy cabin
Ground Staff
Food & Drink
Entertainment
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We're a family of four living in Vancouver and we regularly travel to England to visit family on my wife's side. We don't discriminate too heavily on the carrier; as with most people price is our main consideration. But I would pay a premium to travel with a major carrier versus one of the discount airlines.
You may know that Virgin have just launched their Vancouver service starting this past May. While their website prices were comparable to BA and quite expensive, we were able to book through Canadian Affair (the primary booking agent for discount carriers like Air Transat) for a significant discount of around 30%. I'm not sure if Canadian Affair are still selling VS tickets -- I suspect this was short-term deal to try and promote the new service. Regardless, it allowed us to sample a new carrier for a price equivalent to the discount carriers. Woohoo!
We were able to select our seats in advance -- we like to take the four middle seats in a row for our family, and these tend not to be too hard to come by :-) Our itinerary said we would be on an A340-300, so they only had the smaller economy cabin to choose from. We chose row 54.
Arrival at the airport was uneventful. We checked in from home in the morning so we just had to go to bag drop and check our bags -- the counter staff were pleasant and although the process took a little longer than I would have expected, it was straightforward and smooth.
An aside: of all the airports I have visited, I can't think of one as nice as Vancouver -- many airports are efficient and functional, but I daresay Vancouver is beautiful. And it should be, for the $15 "airport improvement fee" we pay every time we leave. If you are in YVR take some time to enjoy the big aquarium and salmon stream in the (post-security) departure area.
I had checked ahead of time to find out which plane we would be on and I was delighted to find that VMEG (Mystic Maiden) was on route to Vancouver -- we were on an A346 with v:Port. Most of the planes on this route had been A343's with Odyssey, so that was a bit of good fortune. I'm not sure why they changed the plane (assuming that they had originally scheduled an A343 as my itinerary stated). Perhaps someone might know why this happens.
We arrived at our departure gate about 40 minutes before the flight, and the waiting area was empty -- evidently everyone had boarded already. We got on the plane and found it about half full. I asked a flight attendant if the flight was full, and she said that "this was pretty much it" -- apparently there were only 140 passengers on board. We were told we could move seats once the plane was in the air and the seatbelt sign was switched off.
I watched the sign like a hawk and undid my seat belt as soon as I could. We moved to the middle economy cabin which was only sparsely populated and took the entire row 39 so that we each had a pair of seats. A few people managed to snag the holy grail of an entire set of four seats on which to lie down flat.
I enjoyed the V:Port system and played around with it a bit. It's great to have video on demand and the ability to pause/rewind etc. I'm sure the merits and drawbacks of this system have been discussed to death; I did find it too easy to accidentally press a button and turn the screen on while I was trying to sleep, especially with the armrest up (turn screen off, replace controller, raise armrest, controller button is pressed as it's squished into the gap between the seats, screen turns on again). The map interface is clunky, the games are a nice touch but don't hold much appeal in these days of iPads etc.
A word of warning if you're on Mystic Meg and you're in 39C: the display is mounted upside down(!) The flight attendant tried to reset the system but sure enough, the panel is literally mounted upside down -- the linux boot messages were all upside down as well. You'd think this would have been discovered and fixed...
With all the extra room to move, the flight was one of the most enjoyable transatlantic flights I've been on. We left 10 minutes early and arrived almost an hour early as the pilot benefited from some good tailwinds, apparently. The food was nice (beef stew or lemon chicken), and the staff were all friendly. We didn't really have any issues so I can't comment on how problem situations might have been resolved.
In terms of evaluating the experience overall, I think VS do a good job, but I personally feel that the service is pretty much the same as BA, who we have also flown with regularly. The flight structure, meals, extras, seats, cabin arrangement, and entertainment system are all very comparable. If you take away the joy of having a spare seat beside you and a relatively empty flight (something that I can't give Virgin _credit_ for), VS is very good but not one that I would pay a premium for compared with BA.
I suspect for our return flight in two weeks we will get an A343, since the Tuesday flights almost always have those planes assigned. That would be a pity, because the daytime flights are when you really want the better IFE. In comparison, the BA planes on the Vancouver route have been using on-demand IFE for a few years now (albeit with their own clunky touch-screen interface), so I think if VS are to compete in this particular market they're going to have to make sure they have the V:Port planes running regularly.
It will be interesting to see how Virgin judge the success of this new route in the long term. I hope they stick with it, as competition is always a good thing for a consumer.
Thanks for you inaugural TR - sounds like you had a most acceptable trans-atlantic Y experience with most boxes ticked. Will look out for the Aquarium when I go to YVR next year 
