{"id":674,"date":"2007-12-24T12:33:54","date_gmt":"2007-12-24T16:33:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/24\/virgin-america\/"},"modified":"2007-12-24T13:45:11","modified_gmt":"2007-12-24T17:45:11","slug":"virgin-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/24\/virgin-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Virgin America"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I bought my ticket back to California on <a href=http:\/\/www.virginamerica.com\/>Virgin America<\/a> a few months ago and was really psyched about it.  The cabin description sounded excellent, and the fact that they let me pay $25 up front to reserve a bulkhead seat with extra leg room was a big win.  Here are some more impressions after flying with them.<\/p>\n<p>The pre-flight safety speech was pretty funny &#8211; &#8220;If you are part of the 0.001 percent of the population who have never used a seat belt before&#8230;&#8221;  If I flew them all the time, it would probably get old, but the variation on the standard speech (while still covering the same material) was nice.<\/p>\n<p>The inflight entertainment system is excellent.  I loved it.  <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>They had satellite TV to watch, plus two dozen TV shows available without commercials for immediate play &#8211; I watched a couple episodes of Dexter since I&#8217;d heard good things about the show.\n<li>The music selection of MP3s was decent &#8211; I listened to tracks from a couple artists I&#8217;d heard about but didn&#8217;t know the music of.\n<li>Decent movie selection (I chose <em>The Bourne Ultimatum<\/em> but there were several I would have been happy to watch).  Movies were $8, but it was nice that I could watch it at my own pace without worrying about falling asleep or when it was starting or anything.  I could just pause it, take a break, etc.\n<li>Food at my convenience.  It was so civilized that I could order the food I wanted when I wanted it.  It was $10, but I ordered a sandwich and chips when I started watching my movie, and my meal showed up less than 10 minures into the movie.  It felt almost like the <a href=http:\/\/www.picturepubpizza.com>Parkway theater<\/a>.\n<li>The games were pretty cheesy 2002 shareware games, and I didn&#8217;t try the &#8220;inflight chat&#8221; option.\n<\/ul>\n<p>Unfortunately, all of the goodwilll generated by the entertainment system was thrown away completely by the fact that the flight was delayed three and a half hours.  It was scheduled to depart at 6:35pm, boarded after 9pm, and then sat on the runway and didn&#8217;t actually take off until after 10pm.  We didn&#8217;t get in until close to 2am Pacific time, and then there was only one ground crew working so we had to wait 20 or 30 minutes for our bags.  A friend of mine who had also had delay issues with Virgin America theorized that they get low runway priority since they are a new airline, and that makes sense but is unfortunate.<\/p>\n<p>It actually made me think of <a href=http:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/2007\/12\/15\/peak-by-chip-conley\/>the Peak book<\/a> and its pyramids.  No matter how much the inflight entertainment system delighted me, if my base pyramid needs of getting to where I&#8217;m trying to go in a timely fashion aren&#8217;t met, then I won&#8217;t be happy as a customer.  So Virgin America has some work to do.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s not a good sign for the airline industry as a whole that I ended up thinking fondly of my Greyhound bus experience.  The Greyhound may be crowded and slow and sometimes late, but I can literally just walk into the station and hop on a bus 5 minutes later which is wonderfully convenient.  For this flight, I had to spend an hour commuting to the airport.  Then I forgot to pull my laptop out of my bag before security, so I got pulled over and they had to do a full bag search.  And then my flight was delayed hours.  I&#8217;ll stick to the bus and train whenever possible, I think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I bought my ticket back to California on Virgin America a few months ago and was really psyched about it. The cabin description sounded excellent, and the fact that they let me pay $25 up front to reserve a bulkhead seat with extra leg room was a big win. Here are some more impressions after [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-674","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nyc","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nehrlich.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}