Ducati Sporting Club UK > General > Idle Chat > Virgin: the world's best passenger complaint letter?

[Iconic944ss]

Sorry, I needed a laugh and couldn't resist:

Here we reproduce a complaint letter sent to Sir Richard Branson, which is currently being emailed globally and is considered by many to be the world's funniest passenger complaint letter....

"Dear Mr Branson ,

REF: Mumbai to Heathrow 7th December 2008
I love the Virgin brand, I really do which is why I continue to use it despite a series of unfortunate incidents over the last few years. This latest incident takes the biscuit.
Ironically, by the end of the flight I would have gladly paid over a thousand rupees for a single biscuit following the culinary journey of hell I was subjected to at the hands of your corporation.

Look at this Richard. Just look at it:


I imagine the same questions are racing through your brilliant mind as were racing through mine on that fateful day. What is this? Why have I been given it? What have I done to deserve this? And, which one is the starter, which one is the desert?
You don’t get to a position like yours Richard with anything less than a generous sprinkling of observational power so I KNOW you will have spotted the tomato next to the two yellow shafts of sponge on the left. Yes, it’s next to the sponge shaft without the green paste. That’s got to be the clue hasn’t it. No sane person would serve a desert with a tomato would they?

Well answer me this Richard, what sort of animal would serve a desert with peas in:


I know it looks like a baaji but it’s in custard Richard, custard. It must be the pudding. Well you’ll be fascinated to hear that it wasn't custard. It was a sour gel with a clear oil on top. It’s only redeeming feature was that it managed to be so alien to my palette that it took away the taste of the curry emanating from our miscellaneous central cuboid of beige matter. Perhaps the meal on the left might be the desert after all.

Anyway, this is all irrelevant at the moment. I was raised strictly but neatly by my parents and if they knew I had started desert before the main course, a sponge shaft would be the least of my worries. So lets peel back the tin-foil on the main dish and see what’s on offer.

I’ll try and explain how this felt. Imagine being a twelve year old boy Richard. Now imagine it’s Christmas morning and you’re sat their with your final present to open. It’s a big one, and you know what it is. It’s that Goodmans stereo you picked out the catalogue and wrote to Santa about.
Only you open the present and it’s not in there. It’s your hamster Richard. It’s your hamster in the box and it’s not breathing. That’s how I felt when I peeled back the foil and saw this:


Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s more of that Baaji custard. I admit I thought the same too, but no. It’s mustard Richard. MUSTARD. More mustard than any man could consume in a month. On the left we have a piece of broccoli and some peppers in a brown glue-like oil and on the right the chef had prepared some mashed potato. The potato masher had obviously broken and so it was decided the next best thing would be to pass the potatoes through the digestive tract of a bird. Once it was regurgitated it was clearly then blended and mixed with a bit of mustard. Everybody likes a bit of mustard Richard.
By now I was actually starting to feel a little hypoglycaemic. I needed a sugar hit.

Luckily there was a small cookie provided. It had caught my eye earlier due to it’s baffling presentation:

It appears to be in an evidence bag from the scene of a crime. A CRIME AGAINST BLOODY COOKING. Either that or some sort of back-street underground cookie, purchased off a gun-toting maniac high on his own supply of yeast. You certainly wouldn’t want to be caught carrying one of these through customs. Imagine biting into a piece of brass Richard. That would be softer on the teeth than the specimen above.
I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was relax but obviously I had to sit with that mess in front of me for half an hour. I swear the sponge shafts moved at one point.
Once cleared, I decided to relax with a bit of your world-famous onboard entertainment. I switched it on:


I apologise for the quality of the photo, it’s just it was incredibly hard to capture Boris Johnson’s face through the flickering white lines running up and down the screen. Perhaps it would be better on another channel:



Is that Ray Liotta? A question I found myself asking over and over again throughout the gruelling half-hour I attempted to watch the film like this. After that I switched off. I’d had enough. I was the hungriest I’d been in my adult life and I had a splitting headache from squinting at a crackling screen.
My only option was to simply stare at the seat in front and wait for either food, or sleep. Neither came for an incredibly long time. But when it did it surpassed my wildest expectations:


Yes! It’s another crime-scene cookie. Only this time you dunk it in the white stuff.

Richard…. What is that white stuff? It looked like it was going to be yoghurt. It finally dawned on me what it was after staring at it. It was a mixture between the Baaji custard and the Mustard sauce. It reminded me of my first week at university. I had overheard that you could make a drink by mixing vodka and refreshers. I lied to my new friends and told them I’d done it loads of times. When I attempted to make the drink in a big bowl it formed a cheese Richard, a cheese. That cheese looked a lot like your baaji-mustard.

So that was that Richard. I didn’t eat a bloody thing. My only question is: How can you live like this? I can’t imagine what dinner round your house is like, it must be like something out of a nature documentary.

As I said at the start I love your brand, I really do. It’s just a shame such a simple thing could bring it crashing to it’s knees and begging for sustenance.
Yours Sincererly
XXXX

• Paul Charles, Virgin’s Director of Corporate Communications, confirmed that Sir Richard Branson had telephoned the author of the letter and had thanked him for his “constructive if tongue-in-cheek” email. Mr Charles said that Virgin was sorry the passenger had not liked the in-flight meals which he said was “award-winning food which is very popular on our Indian routes.”

[swannymere]

It's not quite as funny 1 year on

[RickyX]

Or even if you work for them...........

[Jools]

Originally Posted by swannymere

It's not quite as funny 1 year on

Depends on how much time you've spent on the internet

I feel for the guy though. The very worst flight I have ever taken in my life was a trip on Virgin from New Dehli to Heathrow.

The check-in computer wasn't working so there was a massive scrum to get checked in, then when I'd fought my way to check in I found I had to get a special ticket (like the ones you get at deli counters - no pun intended) before you'd earned the right to check in. No amount of persuasion would work, so I was pointed in the direction of a rostrum type desk in the middle of the terminal floor, staffed by a single person who was giving out the deli tickets for the check-in for ALL the check-in desks. Needless to say, this wasn't a scrum it was a seething mass of humanity that I had to fight through with a laptop and suitcase. Finally got my check-in counter pass about an hour after the scheduled flight time - but not to worry, the scrum around the Virgin check-in desk was still there...only bigger.

Pushed my way into the melee again and finally reached the check in desk about an hour later...not to worry, there were still people waiting to check in behind me and the plane was still on the tarmac - now about 2.5 hours behind schedule. Finally got rid of the suitcase, which although I always travel light, still contained two weeks supply of shirts and pants and weighed in at 12 kilos that had begun to feel more like 12 stone by this time.

Then into the queue for security. Indian beaurocracy is weird, there are endless things that have to happen that aren't considered necessary anywhere else in the world. You have to sign a form to take your handbaggage on, then you're given an official luggage tag. As you go down the corridors to security, you pass people sitting on chairs at the side of the corridor, at first you just march past them...then they call you back. You have to get a coloured dot from them, which they stick on your luggage tag and another one on your boarding pass. I don't know why, they don't do any checking, they just stick the dots on...presumably it's just to tell everyone further down the line that you've walked past them rather than teleporting to security.

Finally pitched up at security with my growing collection of coloured dots, then found I had to go through immigration first, so into another queue where I did my usual trick of choosing the shortest line, then finding that my line was being served my Mr Pedant who was subjecting everone to a 5 minute exit interview rather than a quick check of the visa and a rubber stamp.

Then I got to security, where women and men join the same scrum, but then women get singled out for separate security checks through their own channel so there's a bottleneck as a sort of traffic policeman holds up all the blokes and waves women through.

Finally, finally, finally I got through security and through the scanners...every single person is bodysearched as well...then, horror of horrors, the security folks found that I had got a long forgotten and broken disposable lighter in one of the hundreds of little pockets in my laptop rucksack. The lighter had no flint in it, so wouldn't even make a spark, and it was completely empty because it was cracked so all the fluid was long gone. But I had to join a quue of other miscreants to have an interview with security then sign a form saying that I was very, very, very, very sorry and I wouldn't do it again.

Finally, all the passengers made it through to the departure lounge and boarding, or rather the stampede to get on the plane started. When I reached my given seat I found a whole family had occupied the whole area around where I was sitting and had claimed my seat as well. There didn't seem to be any one of them that spoke more than a few words of English and trying to convey the concept that you have to sit where your boarding pass tells you seemed completely alien.

It was chaos. Kids were running up and down the aisle, people would get up out of their seat and go and talk to family and friends further down the plane and of course...amongst the manual check in chaos, they found there were more people on the plane than they'd checked in. The cabin crew tried doing a head count, but people kept moving as they did so and it was impossible to reach the same number twice. The stewardesses appealed for everybody to sit down in their nominated seats over the tannoy in English and Hindi, then when that failed, the purser gave it a go...finally the captain walked through each section of the cabin and screamed at the top of his voice "If you don't sit down right now and let us do a headcount I'm ordering everyone off the plane and we're not going anywhere" this was translated into a couple of local languages and the chaos turned into just a bit of restlessness with just a couple of people popping up to get something out of the overhead locker.

Finally, after a further threat from the captain that, "the next person that stands up, or moves anywhere get's thrown off the flight", they managed to check that everyone with a boarding pass was accounted for, and, apart from swapping a few people around whose boarding pass bore no resemblance to where they were supposed to be sitting..that was it, we just had to wait another 15 minutes for a take-off slot and we pushed back and were off. The plane was 6 hours late, with 2 of those hours taken up with the comedy seating arangements after boarding....

All of this was in 40 degree heat....

Finally, we were airborne, and I must've had the same 'food' and entertainment system as the guy above, but honestly...I couldn't have cared less by that time...my nerves were completely fried

[John W]

Jools, maybe you should send that story to mr Branson