Virgin Australia flights to Doha

[Saab34]

He did with the bilateral and the backlash for both Qantas and the government was enormous which is why we’ve now arrived at this. Had Alan stay muted on this one Qatar would have gotten its 28 extra flights without the need to pay Bain billions

I think they would have invested regardless, it really firms up a long term partner in conjunction with their greater ambitions for this market. They didn’t really have a great relationship with QF.

QR has essentially blocked anyone else getting into bed with VA, Turkish would have been a risk also. I think TK would have been a good VA partner.

 

[BrianQQ]

QR has essentially blocked anyone else getting into bed with VA, Turkish would have been a risk also. I think TK would have been a good VA partner.

TK would have been the spark of VA getting into *A. Now it's just dead.

 

[SCM]

I took VA2 the other week back to Sydney from Europe, pretty decent, just like a Qatar flight, the load was around 50-60% but definitely some people had a row to themselves and made good use out of it! Just depends on how lucky you got. Business seemed pretty full though, I was hoping for a free upgrade, but alas didn't get anything.

Sad that the upgrades were not yet live.

Also, Qatar gave me a pass for the oneworld lounge in Amsterdam airport (VA-Plat), which I thought was really cool, and the lounge is almost always got few people in it, so it was very nice to shower and relax there for free.

 

[WLGFlyer]

Traveled to Europe and back on the VA/QR combo and can't really fault it. Booked a couple of Y reward seats on fairly short notice and availability was good. Loads seemed around 60-70%.

Only downside was that I couldn't get the seat selection to stick on the outbound and online checkin wasn't available departing from Australia. Both of these worked on the return leg when using the QR App.

 

[HS-TQE]

I think they would have invested regardless, it really firms up a long term partner in conjunction with their greater ambitions for this market. They didn’t really have a great relationship with QF.

QR has essentially blocked anyone else getting into bed with VA, Turkish would have been a risk also. I think TK would have been a good VA partner.

IIRC The European based carriers can only do interline and/or unilateral domestic codeshares with VA as part of the QR stake acquisition (initially it was a exclusivity agreement between QR/VA, but there was a lot of complaints from other carriers and the ACCC which saw the exclusivity "dialled" down, and led to SQ and VS being 'grandfathered' as VA's FF/redemption partners for Europe but are no longer code sharing into Europe).

VA atm are no longer able to negotiate bilateral partnerships for European and Middle East Carriers (as part of the QR taking up the 23% stake), many (though not all) of the European carriers just has interline arrangements with VA for domestic connections.

 

[HS-TQE]

TK would have been the spark of VA getting into *A. Now it's just dead.

If the likes of SQ and NZ couldn't get VA 1.0 into bed, there was very little chance of TK getting VA 2.0 involved with Bain still at the controls (and the likely risk that VA would've still lost money with *A membership with having to pay $$ to other carriers for FFs accessing their lounges whilst getting little money the other way with Asia an up and down source of income and not enough European members to negate the bleeding of money from VA FF's accessing *A based lounges overseas).

 

[aaronm]

Seems it's possible to waitlist for an upgrade on the website now which is good, however this has also had the effect of removing the selected (economy) seat for that flight, and the website throws an error when I try to re-select. Will give it some time and try again later I guess.

 

[FlyingKangaroo]

A few weeks ago some of you may recall I went on a live-feed tirade trying to get an upgrade on a DOH-SYD sector which was a farcically terrible effort. ~8 hours minimum over several days, at which point, I gave up.

At the last stage, there were still 4 reward seats available in J and the agent was briefly elated when it finally successfully appeared to go through and briefly showed in the reservation. She put me on hold to process payment of the points during which time I even managed to select seats in J... but then she came back and said the system threw a final error when actually attempting to deduct points for payment. I also noticed the reservation had defaulted back to Y (but the seat map still showed us in J; so needless to say, I didn't touch them but assumed the system would sweep us out soon enough).

The error was ultimately "guessed" to be a result of my being Plat and my travelling partner a Silver but we were travelling on a Choice fare for which upgrades are limited to Gold and above. (I suppose I took for granted that like with Economy X, everyone on the reservation would receive the benefit as long as I was Plat.) Despite several follow-ups, the Manila team could not get an answer from Australia to confirm that as long as one person travelling (and in this case, also the one using the points for the upgrades) was Gold or above, everyone in the reservation could upgrade if space was available.

I then noticed a day or two later that on the QR website, the reservation summary showed that sector in J. QR's website doesn't show your seats on the VA native flight number so I couldn't confirm those.

I gave up and decided to just see what happened next April.

Yesterday, two weeks after my last attempt to resolve the issue and without warning or further communication, a new e-ticket arrived from VA and the points were deducted.

Okey dokey. Don't look a horse in its mouth, I suppose. Q-Suite, ahoy.