notzac's Velocity blog

A quick weekend trip to see a friend before he departs permanently for the UK gave me another opportunity to sample the Virgin Blue service. Rather than write two fairly similar posts, I figured I'd condense things in to one post. Here goes:

DJ889 MEL/SYD
Equipment: 73H
Seat: 5D
Timeliness: Early*

After finishing up work on the Friday evening, I Skybus'ed it out to MEL and made a beeline for the lounge. I'm still not convinced of the benefits of ...

A last-minute decision to spend the weekend in CHC saw me booking a flight back to MEL with Pacific Blue. All things being equal, I would have booked both ways with DJ - but the lure of the FLounge was too great.

In case you're wondering, the JQ flight MEL-CHC was a) late and b) uninteresting. I had my exit row seat and was asleep by the time we hit cruise altitude.

Check In and Airport

After swearing black and blue I wouldn't book any future flights ...

So, my DJ Gold pack arrived the other day. It's a fairly simple affair that was mailed to me in an Express Post bag (which I thought was a nice touch, even if it didn't quite make it to me before my flights). Contents:

• 1 x congratulations letter outlining bennies received and how to retain gold etc.
• 1 x shiny card (embossed - hi QF, your competition can still do this...)
• 2 x shiny bag tags (also embossed)

...

Check In

Check in wasn't quite so nice to me this time. I had forgotten to OLCI at T-24, and the seat selection at ~ T-8 wasn't great. I started out in 15C and changed myself to 10C, with the hopes of an improvement once I got to The Lounge..

At the airport

BNE being the ancestral home of DJ, I had moderately high hopes for a reasonable experience here. Security was a surprise - I got a security guard that made polite small talk while I was divesting ...

Check In

• Attempted check-in on iPhone, colossal fail. Going to virginblue.com.au redirects to m-test.virginblue.internal, no great surprise that I can't access that. What the..?
• Unable to check in from within my Velocity account. Not necessarily a problem, but why not?
• Couldn't check in using Velocity number; system couldn't find me? Not sure why.
• Managed to find the booking using the PNR - offered 6C, but can't actually see anything forward of row 9 on the seat map. Odd. No great

...