Virgin America plays customers when it comes to schedules

Virgin America had a big holiday sale for flights in January and it sounds like maybe they didn’t actually sell all of their flights or they overbooked, so they are moving things around at the expense of fliers.

A friend of mine has a flight booked a flight from San Diego to New York in January. A few days later they wrote to tell him that his plane has been repositioned and he has been rebooked on a flight for a day earlier. I’ve heard of this happening the day of, but six weeks in advance? The friend had issues with getting the time off of work and he asked about getting a free hotel room or some such amenity to account for having to take an extra day from work, which was not well looked upon.

Virgin told him that it would be $50 to change the flight and then he’d have to pay the increase in fare, which had gone up to three times as much as he had originally paid. Um, seriously? Sounds like they just overbooked his original flight and want to sell him a first class seat on the same plane. I love the airline, but I really hate to hear about this kind of thing.