VX Policies That Rub Me Wrong - Hope They Change...What are yours?
 

1. Fly Away With Me Safety Video - what an annoying waste of 5 minutes. Just cut to the chase and do a basic announcement...please. Hope this goes away FAST

2. Ordering on RED - Food and drinks. Food always comes first, then the drinks don't come for at least 15 minutes. It's nice to have a beverage with your food. What gives!??? I'm done with my snack by the time the drink comes. Then if you want something when they finally deliver (even water), they tell you no requests, except through RED.

3. Everything UP in First. Sure, a bigger seat is nice, but I don't like having to get up to retrieve my in -flight items from the overhead bin.

4. No announcement for drink (not just alcohol) ordering towards the end of the flight. During the last hour of a flight, being denied water or coffee ? Come on!

(1) The video isn't horridly out of line with the stuff the other airlines have been doing and it doesn't take that much longer (DL, UA, and AA all seem to hover in the 4:00-4:30 range while VS and SQ sit in the 6:00 ballpark...though I suspect the latter are due to differing international requirements).

(2) I couldn't comment...I've never been in the Main Cabin.

(3) I found this to be mildly annoying, but on more than a few flights the FA popped by and proactively offered to retrieve items. Also, vis-a-vis the First cabin on DL and others, this really only affects Row 2 (Row 1 folks almost always have to avail themselves of overhead storage).

(4) See (2). Up in First I could generally get anything until "initial descent" (though boy have I been left pulling my hair out on other airlines about some loose definitions of this).

Edit: For me, the big stinker has always been the airline being unwilling to "marry" connected tickets or check bags through, while the booking system won't even show a three-leg flight (e.g. DCA-DAL-LAX-SEA). I could work around the latter with a phone call, though that could be a pain sometimes. The former, however, was problematic if I was trying to coordinate a trip with someone else and I needed to deal with (for example) the TCON leg sooner rather than later since it generally meant having to re-clear security at SFO (thank the gods I never had to do it at LAX!), and thus having to build a major buffer in just in case things went wrong. Granted, this resulted in me visiting the VS Clubhouse a lot (which wasn't a bad deal), but it was still annoying insofar as it occasionally constrained my flight options.

1) The IFE is going away soon, so you'll get to enjoy a manual safety demo by the crew.

2) I agree, it would be nice to have a drink with your food, but with the amount of people (146 or so) 2 crew have to serve, it is not physically possible. We require everyone to order everything through RED, because that keeps track of our inventory. There's no other way to manage the items we still have available unless it is ordered by the system.

3) You shouldn't have to get up to retrieve your items. The FA should offer to bring them down for you. If not, ring your call light and ask.

4) Drinks and food are available until 35 minutes before landing. At that point, we restock the galley and lock it up for landing.

It's a bit late in the VX game to be hoping for policy changes.

1. Have you seen AA's safety video, what a piece of junk. Just a bunch of people walking around in worm like lines, annoying an distracting to the message. VX's was cute the first 3-4 times I saw it then it became obnoxious. After 20 flights on VX this year I can't wait for it to go away.

2. No comment

3. If you are in a bulkhead seat on any airline with no under seat storage in front of you, F or Y you have to put it up. On other airlines in the non bulkhead F seat most people put stuff up as not much space to put it under seat. Don't really feel this is a valid complaint, but that's just me.

4. No comment

Well, VX will be going away very soon so you will just have to live with it for a little while longer. Don't see VX making any major policy changes at this point in the merger game unless it is to make something directly in line with AS policy.

For me, every week that goes by means VX , as we know it, is on borrowed time.
Very sad for us, enjoyed the entire experience. We are traveling exclusively in F as long as we can. Such a superior product to AS F. Not sure 🤔 we are looking forward to traveling next year. Sure, we will adjust and accept but, sad to see VX go away.

Exactly. I've been lucky to have enjoyed VX in its glory days as the best carrier in NA. It made flying fun again. ^

I'm escaping the West and will have the good luck to be on B6 from BOS going forward. B6 Mint is now the best.

As things stand, having watched how AS devoured VX, my plan is to never fly on them on general principle. [1] VX quite literally got me to enjoy flying, full stop. AS destroyed that, pulling some random window-dressing elements out. I know for a fact that when I read the intro to MileagePlan, the mention of "unlimited complementary upgrades" got an absolutely negative response from me and that I was not alone in this. [2]

Once B6 expands their "Mint map" to cover a few more routes (namely JFK/BOS-SEA) that may well be my go-to (the four Mint suites are amazing, but they're not on quite enough routes for me to deal with the other aspects of B6), but for the moment I'm going to make DL work (especially since it yields me status on VS and I really can't do much with status on B6 anyway...B6 is just a clumsy fit for me as a whole).


[1] I'll preserve my points pile with either some partner trips or with the credit card. No, I'm not letting that go away...

[2] Not that some upgrades wouldn't have been nice on VX, but I would have preferred something akin to Amtrak's "You get X cards per year/a card for every X points you earn" and "Eh, we'll just comp people up to fill F". It tells me that you don't consider your F product to be worth selling me (and in effect that it's "real" value to you is in being able to overbook coach that much more).