Virgin Australia

✅ Trip Verified | Came to Brisbane for work with a Qantas flight and was amazed and how much more organised and friendly the staff were in comparison to Virgin. As soon as I come to the lounge the woman greeting you to scan your ticket man handled my phone. While holding my phone in my hand the guy outside shouted “oi no phones” with no warning and with so much attitude. I got on to the aircraft and there are a seat and floor full of crumbs. Guess I will be flying Qantas from now who offer a beautiful breakfast, not just a protein ball.

✅ Trip Verified | Melbourne to Perth. Boarding was efficient and quick, despite there was only one ground staff at the gate. Virgin Australia’s B737-800 does not have any IFE or USB port so if you are planning to watch the IFE through on-board WiFi streaming, I strongly recommend other passengers to bring a power pack to charge your personal devices. Cabin was clean and fresh when I board the plane. An hour into flight, dinner is served. Choice was chicken with vegetable and rice, or vegetarian penne pasta. Dinner comes with drinks and chocolate mousse as dessert. I chose the chicken with vegetable and rice. Chicken was tender and well marinated, the hot meal was overall delicious although the vegetable was a little overcooked. After dinner, crew went around for few rounds of beverages and water. Overall an uneventful flight, and the flight arrived in Perth on time.

✅ Trip Verified | Melbourne to Cairns. Why anyone would choose Qantas domestic business over this is beyond me. Efficient check in, nice lounge with good breakfast, easy boarding, way more leg room and comfort, much better entertainment options and more. The staff were efficient and warm serving a delicious meal leisurely for the 3 hour trip. Had literally the exact opposite on the same aircraft on Qantas. Great job Virgin, rather sad for Brand Q!

✅ Trip Verified | Perth to Port Hedland. Time and time again they've failed to provide a quality service. Prime example was today. I booked and was in the process of paying for an extra leg room isle seat. The payment had been processed just for them to tell me that my seat had been changed to a middle seat after payment process. Then just to be told that they can't change to any isle seats since the plane was full. As it turns out later one of my work colleague's got the same leg room seat across from me for nothing. Why did I even bother. Why does anyone even bother with this painful company. This isn't the first time I've booked an isle seat for it to be changed. A couple of months ago I used the virgin website to book myself an isle seat before flying. The seat was confirmed, just for me to arrive at the airport and to be told that my seat had been changed to a middle seat. After my flight I called customer service and the answer I was given was to not assign my frequent flyer number to my booking and that should sort the problem out next time. Buyer be prepared to fight for any decency from this mob.

✅ Trip Verified | Darwin to Hobart via Melbourne. We regularly get this flight. The breakfast breakfast snack invariably consists of sugary items such as choc muffins, sweet yoghurt etc. Kids like it, adults don't. The snack is all you get despite the flight being over 4 hours - not even a 2nd cup of tea. Check-in on return flight from Hobart airport is abysmal. Often queues stand for long periods with no-one on counter despite saying they open 90 mins before departure. Then a single staff arrives to check in 3 queues. There seems to be a problem booking on an ipad if you are a Velocity member. I have missed out on sale fares because of this. Get no reply when filling out complaint form. Virgin call centre rarely resolves problems or answers questions, often just refer you to Velocity which has limited hours. Last time the call centre told me their system doesn't allow booking on an iphone or ipad and can only be done on a desktop! They said they were soon getting a new system which fixes this problem. I'm sure this isn't correct.

✅ Trip Verified | Wellington to Brisbane. This is one of the most unreasonable and unhelpful airlines I have ever flown. Zero tolerance for a bag even slightly over the 23kg limit and the charge was extortionate. Never before have I flown with such an unreasonable airline.

✅ Trip Verified | I was booked to fly From Brisbane to Perth on Virgin Australia. I decided to ask my wife if she would like to join me and she was keen so we booked her a ticket on the same flight , and we linked the ticket so Virgin Australia would know we were travelling together. In any case there is only 2 families in Australia with my surname so it should be obvious to anybody we were together. Nonetheless we linked the tickets. Because I was due at the gold coast at 7.00am the following morning, we had hired a car and would need to drive for 1 hour or so to get to our destination. We arrived at the airport early. We were extremely surprised for find out they had downsized the aircraft to save money as it was not fully booked (this is fair enough as long as you are not inconveniencing your customers). My wife could not check in and when we inquired, we were told she was not on the flight. She had been bumped off the flight as there was not enough seats on the new plane. Despite our best efforts, an the efforts of our travel agent we could not get them to reconsider this decision. Apparently it is made in operations, and operations is like heaven and they "never make mistakes". I could not even get them to call operations. I even showed the very presentable but superbly unhelpful staff how to use a telephone. But alas all we were confronted with was smiling resistance to any for of assistance. Their training is impressive! it must be hard to be that intentionally unhelpful with a smile for 30 minutes, and I mean all 4 staff we dealt with. Incredible and almost surreal. In the end we gave up in frustration and I put my wife in a taxi to the Qantas terminal, she caught the next Qantas flight and beat me to Brisbane.To rub salt in the wound , Virgin will not refund my wife's ticket. Can you believe they insist she uses the ticket on another flight. It is like being spared from execution and then being invited back to death row. No thanks. I will never fly Virgin anywhere in the world. I suggest you learn from my experience and save yourself the stress also. PS: I would score Virgin zero if the system would allow it.

✅ Trip Verified | In January my family and I (20 of us) flew with Virgin to Bali. I always fly Qantas, however we thought we were able to find a better deal with Virgin so wanted to give them a try. The flight experience was absolutely horrible as we were not warned that there would be no inflight entertainment, food or blankets on this long haul flight. To top it all off the flight crew were extremely rude and in a foul mood. Most passengers were upset with the service and they did not once try to please their customers in any way shape or form. After our terrible experience we tried to contact Virgin customer service/head office and they were of no help and didn't want to accomodate or hear anything about it.

✅ Trip Verified | Lost luggage on Virgin Australia and they would not reply to any claim or damages. We arrived at Queenstown at about 4pm on Mar 23 2018. My wife and I had a trip from Queenstown across NZ to the North Part of the country over a 7 day period. Upon arrival I learned that my bag was lost. They told me to call a number the next day to track. Our whole trip was in flux because of the bag. The next day, no answer. called other Virgin Australia but they had no help. I drove back to airport and learned that no one comes in until 1300 that day. Was never told that. Since i was already there i waited to learn that the bag would likely be on the 1600 flight that day. Ironically the flight was late and unfortunately learned it was not there. We had waited all day for it. We had some scheduled hikes that we had pre reserved that we went on, I rented some gear to make it through. Instead of following our trip up New Zealand we had to go back to Queenstown to get my bag. Ended up losing a lot of time in our vacation and ontop of it all i could not get them to respond to the cover the damages, i.e. rented materials, unused bookings, etc.

✅ Trip Verified | Sydney to Perth. Pleasantly surprised. Standard 23kg baggage allowance and impressed by the in-flight meals included. Not huge portions and no frozen bread rolls, but really tasty. This is now my game changer for choosing an airline.