Originally Posted by FijiBill

My experience so far:

At T-24 I tried to call for MCS seats and Virgin said they couldn't see my MVP status. I then called Alaska and they said they couldn't look up the Virgin confirmation code. Sigh...

So I went to the airport. The Virgin kiosk only let me print 2/3 boarding passes. More IT issues. So I went to the gate, where things changed for the better.

Gate agent was able to print out the third boarding pass and proactively put me on an earlier (much delayed) flight to get me into SFO from PDX in plenty of time. She even got me an MCS seat! So kudos to the Virgin PDX ground crew!

Unfortunately once I left PDX it went downhill again.

SFO was all messed up because of the fires. My outbound to JFK was delayed by an hour and a half and I almost missed my JFK connection. No MCS upgrade (agent had me show my Alaska MVP card) AND the gate agent switched me out of my non MCS exit row to a "better" row 6 seat? Zilch legroom for the transcon. Terrible.

I hardly had time to switch planes in JFK, so I wasn't able to enter the MCS lottery. Alas, looking at my boarding pass I found I had been unknowingly switched out of my non MCS exit row on JFK-LAX as well. I guess Virgin ejects Alaska elites when they see them in the exit row? Their system apparently can't see if you are MVP or not.

The Virgin entertainment system was pretty nice. The sat wifi works pretty good too. I wish their website worked as well :-)

More on the return...