virgin blue business - pricing relative to qantas, when's the rollout?

[haggiscat]

hey listers

I fly qantas to adelaide ex-sydney quite often, for personal reasons. Always go business class when i can, economy other times with hope of an upgrade (using qantas visa for points too). Anyway the recent price hike from $776 to $840 or whatever it is was kinda the straw that broke the camel's back in terms of doing it both ways at least.

the Virgin premium economy offering was pretty good but nowhere near the comfort of business class. I've only done it twice as a consequence. But, if they introduce their business offering for around the same price as PE i would leap at it. Does anyone have any idea what the prices are going to be like? I reckon Qantas is trying it on a bit with its business class fares.

And when is it coming out??

 

[samh004]

The pricing is just under $500 now and I expect they’ll keep that price point (or relatively near it) when PE becomes J. The roll-out is on now, and will take some time.

 

[Misha]

It's difficult to speculate. At the moment if you buy a PE ticket to Perth from Melbourne you are looking at $700 odd dollars one way. If you get the Business Class option (with a change in Sydney to the A330) it goes up to $1,500 odd as it states on the fare page "Business Class"... perhaps this is indicative of potential costings when the J is rolled out?

*Hope not!*

 

[haggiscat]

It's difficult to speculate. At the moment if you buy a PE ticket to Perth from Melbourne you are looking at $700 odd dollars one way. If you get the Business Class option (with a change in Sydney to the A330) it goes up to $1,500 odd as it states on the fare page "Business Class"... perhaps this is indicative of potential costings when the J is rolled out?

*Hope not!*

Yeah, I notice from Sydney it is about $1300 to Perth, but this is still about 200 bucks less than Qantas. Currently VB is doing Syd-Adel PE for five hundred bucks relative to Qantas $850, so $350 diff. Hope the prices stay the same- after all I dont imagine the food will be decent and there's no curtain so I imagine you'd be bothered by a constant stream of people using the pissoir - like on a recent Qantas flight.

 

[pauly7]

I dont imagine the food will be decent and there's no curtain so I imagine you'd be bothered by a constant stream of people using the pissoir - like on a recent Qantas flight.

We can only hope that Virgin address the lack of a proper barrier between Y and J on the 737 fleet.

It should be noted that the new bird flying round at the moment is not final so hopefully Virgin fix this rather major oversight up, has been discussed already in many threads.

Fingers crossed!!