Just went through the worst customer service experience in recent memory; I recently booked a Virgin Atlantic upper class codeshare, JFK�LHR for travel for 2 in July. When I booked this flight, the confirmation email and AF website both displayed �economy V� as the fare class, but the Virgin site showed business and allowed me to select seats there. I assumed it was a harmless codeshare quirk.

I got an email last morning that our 9pm flight was cancelled and we were moved to a 6pm departure, which was not ideal since we wanted to visit the Virgin lounge for dinner after work. I call up the AF number and give the agent a Virgin flight departing at 9:30 that he switches us to, but he mentions economy seats and logging into Virgin confirms that we�ve been downgraded. I bring this up and he says that the booking was originally made as economy, he apologizes for his mistake but he can�t help me and I must call the FB hotline.

The FB agent insists that the booking was originally made as economy despite me having spent 118000 points and over 400 euros in fees. Despite my insistence and placing me on hold several times to check further, she was unable to escalate me nor did she ever admit that there was any fault on their end. I found the experience of being repeatedly told I didn�t book a business class seat to be extremely insulting.

Eventually she was able to refund and rebook me back onto the 6pm flight�for some reason there were no more business class codeshare availabilities for later Virgin flights despite them all being available last month�just my luck that I picked the one that would be cancelled! This turned out to be the only way to restore my original booking class as the agent couldn�t upgrade the current itinerary. Despite my �economy� ticket conveniently yielding enough points upon refund to book two business class tickets, the agent did not admit any fault.

In the end I was several hours and $50 poorer due to the higher fees+taxes on my new itinerary. I�m attempting to follow up via email to get this difference refunded but after this experience I�m not holding my breath. I would really appreciate if anybody has any advice on getting refunded or even being rebooked on one of the later flights. Also consider this a warning for anyone considering booking Virgin via FB!

 

You should not give up to solve this. This is another bug of classes not being reflected correctly across partners. I faced the same in 2020 (but didn’t get any problem as I had to cancel this trip to the US because of Covid). Look at this thread at posts #193 to 198.
Virgin Atlantic, Air France and KLM launch codeshare partnership

 

Ah thanks for the link, good to know I’m not alone.

 

Same issue used to pop up semi regularly with DL codeshares on AF. They were business class fares, but you end up seated in AF LaPremiere. Well till inevitable schedule change or AF needs to rerun seating, or checkin agent catches. Then bam, downgraded to business seat. Issue was DL used FGAP for business class while AF used those for LaPremiere.

Same can happen now, but DL use FGAP for their PE cabin. Even bigger of a downgrade.