Tim_T

Looking thru the 2005 Virgin Holiday Florida, noticed the club Orlando service from MAN to MCO will be replaced with Upperclass from May 2005. Does this suggest a new plane or a refurb of the Air Iceland (or whoever it is) plane that Virgin use for this route?

filberts sst

A glance at the virgin holidays website would seem to confirm that this is indeed the fully fledged upper class service.

What I'd like to know is

a) are upperclass seats generally upper deck ?
b) given I'm am planning a trip Manchester-Orlando in Aug 2005, what is the likelihood of the upperclass suites being on this route.
c) what are the chances of a) b) given that it seems to be an old air atlanta plane that is used.

Many thanks for any help

AlanA

You might be better asking these questions on the Virgin Flyer (v-flyer.com) forum, bus as far as I have gleaned, the old 747-200 will be removed from the Man service and replaced with 747-400 planes from either LGW or LHR.
If you go to Virgin Flyer, you can see the seat charts
On somke aircraft they are only downstairs at the front and on some others they are both upstairs and downstairs

idahost

I took MCO - MAN in Club Orlando last week and LGW - MCO Upper Class on the return. I had an older guy next to me screaming that Delta charged him a full 100k miles for a coach meal. It was funny because he was also looking for the "Suite". He had a copy of an ad from The Economist" showing the suite. The whole Club Orlando thing is confusing becaue VS will book it as Upper Class. In any case, I would say I had better service on the Manchester flight in Club "O" than the Orlando return in Upper Class.

upgrader

Any new info on the MCO-MAN equipment for Summer of 2005? My wife and I have a reservation for MCO-MAN and return at the end of July in Upper Class. I looked on the VS web site and it still says the 747-200 from Air Atlanta is being used now but I don't know if that will be the case in July. No one at VS CS seems to have a clue. The scary thing is that right now when we check our dates the highest class listed is premium economy, not UC. When we made our reservation with DL they said UC was available for the usual 100K. We certainly would not want to use 100K each to get seats and service that are only premium coach. There was no other business class award travel available on any of the DL partners for the weeks we wanted even with some flexibility.

We also have the choice of coming in and out of London on VS at that time. I've not heard good things about VS UC from MCO-LGW in comparison to other VS gateways from the US to LGW so I'm leery of doing MCO-LGW but would do it if the MCO-MAN service and equipment were no better or, heaven forbid, worse. We will be touring through Scotland so MAN would obviously be more convenient but there's nothing worse than starting and ending a vacation with poor flights, especially when you've laid out 200K miles. Are we going to be faced with a choice between the lesser of two evils?

MAN Flyer

The 744's are already being used at MAN, I landed behind one yesterday morning. I believe the intention is to phase the 742's out by next summer.

idahost

I just booked for the British Open in July and I am booked in Club Orlando on my return flight from Manchester. I don't think it's going away.

Aleks

According to Virgin Holidays, the Club Orlando service is being phased out on the 742 from 30 April 2005:

Aleks