Virgin faces legal action over 33-hour flight delay
Virgin has apologised to nearly 100 passengers on a flight from Las Vegas to London Gatwick who suffered a series of delays last week.
Angry passengers on Flight VS44 have set up a Facebook group to fight for more compensation for the delays, which ended up reaching 33 hours.
The flight was set to leave Las Vegas’s McCarran International Airport at 4.30pm on Monday, but didn’t leave until Wednesday morning.
At first, passengers were told the delay was due to a problem with the air-conditioning, but were then told it was a problem with the plane’s rudder.
They were put up in hotels on the Monday night but had to spend Tuesday evening at the airport terminal.
Passengers took to Twitter to vent their frustrations.
Suzi Mitchell tweeted: "Cannot begin to describe the terrible customer service from @VirginAtlantic. Flight delayed from Las Vegas for over 30 hours. So mad."
Simon Turner said: "@VirginAtlantic still stuck at Las Vegas airport for 30+ hour delay. Is this the new script for the hangover4? You couldn’t write this stuff."
A Virgin spokesperson said it was ‘sorry for the inconvenience caused’.
"On this occasion, the initial delay was caused by a technical fault with the aircraft and the delay was then extended because of strong winds around the McCarran airport area which hampered our engineers carrying out the repairs.
"All of our customers were provided with hotel accommodation and meals while they waited, and we will reimburse them for any reasonable out-of-pocket expenses. In addition, we will be providing eligible customers with EU compensation to the equivalent of €600 per person."
But some passengers said they would be taking legal action to get more than the standard compensation.
Bev
Editor in chief Bev Fearis has been a travel journalist for 25 years. She started her career at Travel Weekly, where she became deputy news editor, before joining Business Traveller as deputy editor and launching the magazine’s website. She has also written travel features, news and expert comment for the Guardian, Observer, Times, Telegraph, Boundless and other consumer titles and was named one of the top 50 UK travel journalists by the Press Gazette.
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