Flew VX for the first time this weekend, LAS-SFO and back. Got the tickets for $44 each way/$108.50 AI, so no complaints at all there.

We were scheduled to leave at 9:10am Saturday morning, and things got a little bit strange when I got a call on Saturday morning at 7:20am from a VA rep saying they wanted to leave early, so we needed to get to the airport as soon as we could. She claimed that they had clearance to leave early, and the weather was supposed to get bad at SFO, and if we left at the scheduled time, we'd face a three-hour delay, so they wanted to leave by 8:40.

That was the first time I'd received such a call from any airline about any flight., and thought it a little bizarre. Of course, we ended up leaving the gate at 9:10 anyway, and the weather in San Francisco was gorgeous all weekend.

In-flight experience was mostly fine. Seats are comfy with nice pitch, but Red needs some work. The live TV was particularly poor. On the outbound flight, CNN was the only channel that appeared to stay watchable for the entire flight; on the return, more than half the channels were showing a Dish Network info channel or the "signal has been lost" message. Roughly another quarter of them froze up mid-flight. My SO said she had a really hard time getting music to play properly, and I found the user interface for that part of the system fairly difficult to use.

I'm sort of in two minds about this. On the one hand, given the $44 fare and for such a short flight, I'm not really bothered. On the other, the in-flight experience was a bit disappointing because of Red, and the upshot is that I probably wouldn't pay a premium for VX over other airlines. Red is an additional amenity rather than a necessity, but VX pitches it as one of their big differentiators over other airlines, so when it's disappointing, I feel like VX hasn't fully come through on the promise of their brand. For such a short flight, as I said, it's not a big deal, but it's something I'll keep in mind for longer itineraries that fit VX's routes. (The lack of details on their FF program is also a sticking point for me.)

I'm still a bit perplexed by the Saturday morning phone call, too. It came about 10 minutes before I was planning to leave the house, so it wasn't a real problem. I was thinking about what would have happened if it was on the return leg, though. We had plenty of things we wanted to do in SF, and we planned our schedule with the scheduled departure time in mind. Moving that up to an earlier time would create a bit of an annoyance if it meant we couldn't get to do some of the things we wanted to do. Of course, a three-hour delay on the outbound flight could have the same effect, I guess

Edit: for those of you interested in load details, I'd estimate there were approx 30-40 people on the outbound flight, maybe 50-60 on the return.