You are not the only person to think that a lot of Virgin Atlantic's success is based on expectations that are rarely met. The free ticket will be 'subject to availablity' and I suspect that they will only offer award tickets that members of their frequent flyer club can book using points. For most destinations, these need to be booked as soon as they go on sale, 330 days before departure so I am not surprised that the 5 or so seats available per flight are long since gone for June 2011. Have a look for late in the year, November might be a good month for seats but for summer, you needed to have booked a long time ago

I used Virgin Atlantic to fly to Cuba from London in August 2010. On the way back, I was stuck in Havana for nearly 3 days because of a mechanical problem with the plane. I will not go through the major inconveniences this has caused to me both personally and professionally. Virgin promised all passengers a complementary flight anywhere in the world (except on their Australia route) valid for 18 months.

It took me 5 months to receive a confirmation letter for this complementary flight. When I finally got it (after continually sending them emails and calling them), I called reservations in February 2011 to try and book a flight for June 2011 to be told "you called too late, no complementary seats are available, you should have called earlier". When I explained that I ONLY just received the confirmation letter, the lady didn't want to hear about it. She was the least helpful person that I have come across. For an airline advertising high standards of customer service and strong ethics, they have a pretty odd way to show it.



Basically, Virgin delivered false promises at the time of the incident in order to keep angry passengers quiet and avoid a considerable amount of complaints but they are now refusing to honour their offer, hiding behind lame excuses.