The pandemic has caused airlines to rethink route planning, based on travel restrictions and the lack of business demand. We’ve seen airlines try all kinds of new routes, so here’s an example of that from Virgin Atlantic.
Continue reading: Virgin Atlantic Launching Flights From Edinburgh
Share your questions, experiences, and thoughts below.
Edinburgh is not quite a totally new city for Virgin, they used to operate their ‘Little Red’ service to Heathrow out of here. But interesting to see them operate wide bodies out of there for the first time!
They used to fly scheduled charter flight out of Glasgow to Miami or orlando with the 747-400 with VS flight code
For a number of years Virgin had a seasonal route from Glasgow to Orlando, in the press release from Virgin Trade they indicate customers will be advised of the new departure airport so I assume there will be an EDI-MCO route once the US open up.
Reading the tweet from Virgin, currently still taking bookings for 2022 from Glasgow but customers will be contacted to change flights, as they are pulling out of Glasgow.
Whenever I priced up MCO there was a marked increase in the direct price where as united, American, aer lingus seemed to provide a more cost effective way to travel same as BA but with the added extra of being able to clear customs and immigration at Dublin, Jfk, phl or ewr as opposed to Lhr or lgw. All in all, will be interesting to see what price point that the MCO route in particular shows.
Also they don’t exclusively operate out of London and Manchester; they still operate a summer seasonal Belfast - Orlando service (which was cancelled because of Covid)
Back before covid, you used to be able to see up to 5 Virgin 747's at MCO at once! At the peak of summer, they had 3 flights to Gatwick, 2 to Manchester, and one to Belfast and Glasgow, all on 747's. 5 of them would overlap in their turnaround at MCO. I once saw 6 there as well (one flight was delayed).
VS have also announced a 2x weekly LHR-Nassau, Bahamas service as of this coming NOV 20th, currently scheduled using a 787, with ticket sales having started today...
Hi there I feel it would be great as I know that there is a New York flight as well as Dubai flight as I have only been on European flights from there and I would be happy to try them myself.
Curious! Didn't Virgin pull out of St Lucia approximately 2 years ago,apparently due to the St Lucian goverment refusing to subsidise the London services?
What has changed?
Surely they will have to drop some routes. During Covid, Virgin retired their 8 747-400's and their 4 ex-airberlin A330's, both of which were used on leisure routes. They have also launched three routes to Pakistan (which are currently 11x weekly frequencies). As far as I know, VS only has some A350 deliveries down the line for the 747 replacement, so they will have to cut some routes down the road once traffic starts to pick up. Could we maybe see them order more A350/787 aircraft?
EDI-MCO will be very popular but pricing has to be competative. VS flew GLA-MCO previously and had great success with the 747-400 and A330 fleets.
Absolutely delighted to see this given EDI is my home airport! Hopefully these routes stay around and more follow as I've got a decent stash of VS points and vouchers to use!!