New advance seat reservation system now LIVE

After goodness knows how many tries finally managed to bag 6A through 9A upper outbound and also PE on the return (including our fav 19a-c). Did have the same frustration with having seat map and then server busy but ok when i went back in. The T&C's re requests and payment info very slick and the confirmation emails a nice touch. IT dept. on probation

we made 2 separate bookings while ago on the same flight.
My wife booked using miles for herself and 2 nieces and i booked using miles for myself. (so 2 separate references)
my wife logged on this morning and booked 3 seats at no charge.
i then logged on to take the 4th seat in the row so we are all together and got charged £50.
don't know whats going on.

Haven't you received a confirmation email?

Didn't get one immediately but I had to head out to work so couldn't wait to see if one turned up. And despite having 2 separate computer systems on my desk, neither allows me to access my home e-mail. Just hoping it's there when I get home later.

OK I have come out and then gone back in and have managed to access the seat plan again. I can confirm that the bulkhead seats on the LGW A330 (VS90) is not yet open. Bizarre how the equivalent seats on the 744s are open - does make you wonder what the logic is.

Just managed to get back into my booking and it's still showing the seats I chose earlier. But I'm still hoping I'll have a confirmation e-mail at home.

What I am surprised about is that, according to the seat maps, I'm the only person who has chosen seats yet.

Just managed to get back into my booking and it's still showing the seats I chose earlier. But I'm still hoping I'll have a confirmation e-mail at home.

What I am surprised about is that, according to the seat maps, I'm the only person who has chosen seats yet.

When I did mine before 8 o'clock I got the email straight away.
Bearing in mind there is back log of 9 months worth of bookings who will be trying to get seat allocation I'm not in the least surprised it's going slow. When it all settles down in a week or two it should be much quicker, maybe how it was between 6 and 8 this morning.

Dick D

RE: VH seat selection, you will be able to select your seats at the same time as other can from 8am tomorrow. Although the booking hasn't been 'handed over' to VA fully until 72 hours before, they do still have your booking on the system, and it's only amendments and upgrades that you need to do with VH and not VA. So your seat selection, as this isn't a booking amendment, is held with VA. (I hope this bit all makes sense)

RE: Reserved sections for VH customers - VA no longer hold any seats specifically for VH customers, so you'll have the same selection plan as anyone that books direct with VA.

RE: Children near to the stairs - These are good seats for those sitting in Economy, as the location is good. Depending on whether its a LGW version or LHR version, you may or may not have a loo behind you, and the kids will be fine, if you keep them away from the stairs

Hope this helps?
^JR

I must thank you for this advice, it was spot on. I Googled some images of the stairs on the upstairs cabin and it's a different arrangement to what I thought so I have no issues with it. Book 79&80 this morning.

Monitoring the Facebooks and Twitters this morning, looks like things are easing off and people are now getting through on the website although the phones still having a bit of a queue and the person on the other end of the phone sometimes doesn't gave a system to use.

On the whole I'll give VS IT a B+

RE: Reserved sections for VH customers - VA no longer hold any seats specifically for VH customers, so you'll have the same selection plan as anyone that books direct with VA.

I am not too sure this is the case. When I went to reserve some PE seats in the bubble this morning for an MCO flight next year I found the entrire left hand side to be blocked out much as it normally is for VH. This was around 0700 this morning so no way that they could have been all booked beforehand!

Well it is a bit of a mess at the moment, mixture of old/new site, seat map shows, then doesn't, this could be an interesting day to say the least. My seats were in the system at the start of the day, who knows what will happen by the end.

What I am surprised about is that, according to the seat maps, I'm the only person who has chosen seats yet.

In contrast to my outbound at the end of March where all seats (save those I snaffled) appeared to have been reserved....

Is there really going to be that much of a backlog with everyone piling in to reserve their seats? It was well into T-60 before we weren't the only people who had requested seats last summer.

MMB still available at the moment but any attempt to access seat map a I am getting the status 503 requested service is not available. Oh dear back to the slammer VS IT

I am just not sure what they expected to happen at 0800 on the morning. I know a lot of posters will say that it is only us travel geeks that know this stuff, but I do wonder. They should have planned for the worst case anyway, ie, the world and his wife logging on at the same time. However, this is Virgin's IT so no surprise.

I am surprised they made it live at 0800 GMT on a week day, a time when people would generally be able to get logged on etc.

I would seriously have considered doing the deployment at 0200 or a 'soft launch' of a flight by flight roll/out over a week or two so the load on the system didn't break it.

I set a reminder on my phone but evidently did something wrong as it didn't remind me this morning; we've been so busy that I only just remembered now! Anyway, I've been able to select our inbound UC seats from LAX>LHR in April and every seat was available (phew!), but I'm getting an error when trying to select the seat map for the outbound flight to SFO. I'll keep trying. Also need to reserve our PE seats to SFO and back in March, but less worried about those as I'm strangely less fussy about where we sit in that cabin.

Edit: Tried again and the outbound leg worked this time, too, and again seat map was wide open. PE seats all booked as well. Aaaand relax.

I think, and will be corrected, but it is 0000 Pacific Time it went over but they forgot to add +8 for the UK no doubt.

[mitchja]

Just gone in again to have a look at the seat maps and it's gone belly up again lol.

Bit of a balancing act The desire to give customers some good news that a long standing issue is being sorted and suffer the consequences when everyone tries to us it! Soft launch no advance fanfare then when is all settled down big announcement. Trouble is news spreads really fast especially with v-flyers around so no win really. Solution, do a proper job and add as much hardware/support as it needs.

I think, and will be corrected, but it is 0000 Pacific Time it went over but they forgot to add +8 for the UK no doubt.

Could be. First there was time, then space time and now VS IT time.

Possibly the green shoots of recovery, seat map seems stable for now !

Like I said earlier, I'm not sure where the 8am came from but so glad I woke up at 6am and sorted my seats out with no problem and Email confirmation came through immediately

I'd like to say a big thank you to this forum because without these info posts, I personally would never have known the new seating system was going 'live' today. I've seen no other publicity about it.

Tops marks v-flyer

Latest bug to report....

If you're a gold card holder, and want economy exit row, the system tries to charge you. If you try and pay, then it fails, and you don't get a confirmation

If you then phone the Service centre, they say you need to pay (even as a gold card holder). They try and put through payment and it fails. They scratch their heads

You then tell them to put it through WITHOUT PAYMENT (which they can do somehow). Success - confirmation comes through...

Makes getting tickets at Glastonbury look easy -

Peter

didn't bother trying at 8 am , as I fully expected it to crash with everyone logging on at that time, and as I am travelling solo am pretty flexible in my choice of seats.
I have to admit I was pretty surprised how many seats had already been reserved but managed to secure ( for now , till check in) my first choice on the way out, and second choice ( and in the bubble !) on the homeward flight.
I will wait with bated breath for the actual flights to see if I still get the same seats on the actual day .

I just got on without any issues to book seats for my LAS trips in January and March, both went through without a hitch and got my email confirmations.

VERY annoying though that you now get logged out of flying club when you logout of the first booking and again when you logout of the second booking ... but you can't have everything, I guess, so just logged back in after doing first booking to do second booking.

I awoke at 1200 as I'm straight back from South Africa to Night Shifts and managed to bag 19A for my VS019 in January and my VS007 in April, with my fuzzy night shift brain on I was a little confuse when directed to the Payment page even scrolling back a few times just to make sure I had everything right, my seats were the only ones selected in UCC for my flights apart from the Bassinet seat held back for checkin.

Odd, I didnt notice that happened to me. I have four bookings on the go at the moment, and I managed to do all of them without having to log back into FC.