When I said one of your flights, I meant the airline, not wysiwyg. Sorry, that didn’t read very clearly. As I am flying on a B744 (I believe), I don’t think I’ll have wysiwyg taking me to SFO. 🙁

Things are going fine, Duess. Best bit is that I now get Upper Class food as standard. I got my uniform trousers 2″ too big in anticipation (and I’m not joking!).

He he – glad to hear it. Sounds like a fun airline to work for as well as to fly with as a passenger. I have the absolute pleasure of being a passenger on board your SFO flight next Thursday. I booked Virgin specifically as they served me well when I flew to EWR a few years ago. I simply cannot wait to fly with them again. The only downer is that I turn 30 during my trip, but the trip was actually booked to help ‘celebrate’ this milestone. I hope you continue to enjoy it all at Virgin. They would be top of my list of airlines to work for.

Sorry for going off-topic here, but have you already started flying with Virgin, Wysiwyg? How’s it all progressing for you?

As long as you are happy with your choice, that’s the important thing. You still won’t convince me that a reasonable amount of money extra quantifies a beef hotpot or the likes on GB Airways and certainly not when the flying time is extended due to a connection at LGW. Pay more on GB, but take 2 hours longer? Nah, I’d still choose Monarch and simply take my own grub if I didn’t like the on-board set-up. I did it for years on Ryanair with out it bothering me in the slightest. Ryanair just have too many other ‘totally unacceptables’ for my liking nowadays.

That’s fair enough. I’ve tried my best to explain the reasons for these changes, but I understand that people have their own standards of expectation and when something you liked changes, it isn’t always easily accepted. I hope that BA/GB don’t let you down now or you would be stuck for getting to GIB by air! :p

With ZB, there are still the newspapers and magazines, the in-flight entertainment, pre-bookable seats, pre-bookable extra legroom seats and, of course, a generous frequent flyer scheme, Vantage Club, that makes free flights quite easily achievable. None of the above are available on our competitor from LTN and I believe only the pre-bookable seats are available from MAN with our competitor there.

Anyway, mate, I hope you can continue to enjoy flying, no matter which airline you choose. I spend most of my money on EZY these days and they are a big competitor of ours – but obviuosly I fly Monarch on the routes that we do fly. EZY simply have routes that I want to fly on from my local airport. Ryanair used to get a big chunk of my business, but then they let me down too often with cancelled flights, changed airports with two days notice whilst I was already halfway through my trip (seriously!), rude staff, unsympathetic attitude and therefore, I will now only fly Ryanair when I have no other choice. But, before I get slated for this, they did let me down badly several times, something that EZY have never done even once.

I doubt that Monarch carry enough hot meals to cover every passenger Danairboy, but then again this is because since before the introduction of the new menu, we discovered that not every passenger wants a hot meal. Some do, some don’t. Personally, I didn’t like Monarch Scheduled’s hot breakfast because there were baked beans in most of them, which I can’t stand. So as it happens, I was rather miffed when presented with a meal I couldn’t eat. Have you honestly never opened an airline meal and then instantly turned your nose up at it?? The choice of buying something I like, rather than the lottery of getting an included-in-the-cost meal that I may or may not like is much more preferable to me and, as it seems, most of ZB’s pax. Now obviously we cannot guarantee everyone their first choice, the logistics of that are impossible to crack. Constant monitoring of the popularity of each product on each flight will soon determine the average quantities we need to carry, if indeed these levels haven’t made themselves apparent already. I also doubt we will carry just enough individual meals, sandwiches etc to cover just one per passenger. I’d expect there to be a buffer on popular items out of sheer common sense.