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Which Virgin Australia Seat is Right For You?

February 9, 2009 at 12:43 PM | by juliana | 3 Comments

Actually that's sort of a silly question because we're guessing on long-haul flights like this most of you are going to take the least expensive option which is economy unless you just happen to be a movie star, recording artist, successful business person or are checking off the last few bullet points on your bucket list.

Yet just in case your budget has some wiggle room, we've summarized each class on the brand-new V Australia 777 planes, the first of which makes its maiden trip from LAX to Sydney on Feb. 27th.

Since the flight is almost 15 hours long, seat pitch and booze are what we're interested in the most. But there are a few other perks, namely the in-flight entertainment system RED which we love so much on Virgin America. Additionally, CEO Brett Godfrey told us about the Aeromobile plans for the plane in which people would be able to use their PDAs and cellphones to send emails and text messages. "But not phone," he said. "I don't want all these voices in the cabins."

Since the plane is not going to have in-flight WiFi (at least not at the start), this Aeromobile plan sounds pretty good. Except we aren't quite sure what the data charges will be like on our cellphone bill and the service is not actually guaranteed to be working come Feb. 27.

Overall, we were in love with the business class seats especially since they lie totally flat. The premium economy seats were nice, certainly better than coach but still lacking any "wow" factor.

Economy, however, made us cry on the inside a little. We've flown to Sydney from LAX in coach on Qantas (in a middle seat no less) and we were kind of hoping that Virgin Australia would use the same type of leather coach seats as the Virgin America planes. Instead, they went with cloth seats and strange color combos. Here's to hoping that Richard Gere is sitting up in biz class all alone and wants our company. But we'll settle for a cheap prescription of sleeping meds instead.

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