Introduction

In fairness to virgin Atlantic.com, we have chosen to make comparison between this site and that of EasyJet.com. Therefore we are about to inform you on background historical information on Virgin Atlantic leading to present day.

History of Virgin Atlantic

Virgin Atlantic was founded approximately eighteen years (1984) ago to date, was developed as an offshoot of Richard Branson’s Virgin Group. Richard Branson’s Virgin Group found a loop hole in the services that were being offered by the existing airlines at that time. A small newcomer taking on the leading giants known as the peoples champion introducing better services and lower costs for passengers with a reputation for quality and innovative product development.

As a result Virgin Atlantic has developed to become Britain’s second largest longhaul airline business offering service to many major cities around the world.

On the 5th July 2000 Virgin Atlantic Airlines established flight links to Delhi, on 16th July 2001 Virgin Atlantic also launched a new service form Heathrow Airport to Lagos and then in August 2002 the launch of services flying to Granada and Tobago.

Virgin Atlantic also offers customers the option of booking holidays through its Virgin Holidays company, facilitating over 250,000 passengers per year.

Virgin Atlantic market shares for 2001 include services to Florida of 50% and the Caribbean at 46% and the West Coast at 30%, please refer to appendix.

Therefore the performance statistics of Virgin Atlantic portrays (see appendix) an increase in the levels of turnover from 1989 to the year 2001, with a sole except of a decrease in 2002, this may be reflective of the September 11th 2001 attack on the World Trading Centre Towers in the United States of America.

www.Virgin Atlantic.com

Description of Website

Once the country of residence that the browser live in is chosen, it then proceeds to the online booking page were there’s links advertised for customers or visitors to view special offers and there are also a variety of other attractive links to chose from. Both Websites provide this but Virgins may be considered to be more attractive.

EasyJet offers 100 routes between 36 key European airports, whilst Virgin fly to over 30 destinations not only with their planes but with their alliance partners which are Bmi British Midland, Continental Airlines, Malaysia Airlines, Singapore Airlines and Nationwide Airlines.

When signing into Virgin Atlantic’s Website it gives you the opportunity of 11 different countries to choose from which are, UK, USA, Antigua, Australia, Barbados, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, South Africa and St. Lucia. (see appendix)

When signing into Easjet, they offer 7 different languages to choose from which are English, En Francais, En Castellano, Nederland, Auf Deutsch, and Pa Dansk, In Italiano. (See appendix).

Virgin Atlantic’s hotel search is pretty straight forward browser simply chose the destination or the city to be visited stay, preferred dates, amount rooms that are required including children options if any. The web page reveals an option where the ages of the children are specified. After all sections has been filled with browsers requirement, browsers click on hotel search and it will bring up a list of hotels in ascending order in price starting with the cheapest first. (See appendix).

Upon searching the Website Virgin Atlantic has aimed to make booking online as easy and straight forward as possible. When you’re on the online booking page (see appendix) it gives the browsers an effect of booking through a travel consultant. The website provides ample opportunities to check your details before proceeding to check out.

The different types of online services that are provided by virgin are routes & schedules were one can view route maps, flight schedules, flight status, and partner airlines. There’s also a service for members which is called flying club were members can read about the benefits