Out on Virgin, home on BA: one family, both flagships, an interesting comparison

The usual disclosure, in reverse again: every seat on this trip was paid for by us. No press tickets, no upgrades whistled up through contacts — just parents buying business class for their family and finding out, in both directions, what the money buys. One caveat you should weigh as you read: I hold Gold status with Virgin, and no status whatsoever with BA despite, oddly, flying BA more often. How that state of affairs is a thing is a piece for another day, but it matters here, because status shaped the two experiences before either plane left the ground.

Virgin, outbound - VS5, Heathrow to Miami. It starts months before departure, in fact. With Virgin I could pre-select our seats well in advance, for nothing, and chose four together that were best placed for the family. Nice and easy, done in minutes, never thought about again.

Then the ground experience, where Virgin is hard to beat. The Clubhouse is brilliant. I use it fairly regularly for business and it has never once disappointed. But it turns out to be quietly superb for families too. The deli counter is a godsend with fussy children, who can pick exactly the bits they want, and there are genuinely healthy options for parents keeping half an eye on their intake. The free-flowing bubbles do no harm either.

At boarding, the boys were handed flight packs without any fuss: little rucksacks with a few small toys, sunglasses, an activity book. A lovely touch, and the tone-setter for the whole flight, because Virgin's crews remain what they've always been in my experience super attentive, warm, and visibly good with children.

Now, the seat, and here I have to be honest about a product I otherwise enjoy, with an important piece of context. Virgin currently flies three different Upper Class products, and the herringbone cabin on this 787 is the oldest of them; the other two are far more akin to BA's Club Suite, and much more my kind of product when I'm travelling alone. So check your aircraft before you book, because the cabins are not created equal. This one, though, I have never much liked. The lack of privacy is the killer for me, open a laptop and half the plane can read your screen, and having to climb out of the seat to flip it into a bed feels properly dated against today's business class benchmark. And yet: travelling with children, the very openness I dislike became the cabin's biggest asset. You can see your kids, reach your kids, tend to your kids without relying on cabin crew. Useful when you're a parent. Not what I want when I'm actually travelling on business, which is, after all, rather the point of business class.

Where Virgin sealed it was the catering. Upper Class lets you pre-select meals, which I'd used to line up a selection for my wife and I off-piste from the regular menu that felt a bit special. Without our asking, kids' meals had been loaded for both boys, chicken fingers, mash, veg, ketchup naturally, ice cream to finish. One of my sons has an allergy that ruled out parts of his meal, and the crew went properly above and beyond to fix it, hunting out everything on board he could safely eat including, at one point, items from their own crew catering. That is service well beyond the job description, and it's the sort of thing we wouldn’t forget.

BA, homeward - BA196, Houston to Heathrow. Here the story also starts before departure, less happily. With no status, BA wanted north of £100 per seat to choose in advance for a family of four, a meaningful sum on top of business class fares. Knowing airlines are obliged to seat children with their parents, I declined to pay, and we were assigned all four seats across row 13. That sounded ideal. It wasn't. In the Club Suite's staggered layout, the window suites sit noticeably further back than the middle pair, so during take-off and landing, strapped in with the seatbelt signs on, we could barely see or communicate with the boys in their own suites, and had to rely on the crew to check they were alright. The better configuration, we worked out mid-flight, was fairly obvious: two sets of middle pairs, my wife with one boy, me with the other, everyone within reach. I couldn't have changed seats until 24 hours before departure anyway, but the real point is that I only discovered the practical option once on board. BA, who designed the cabin and assign the seats, should have known it all along.

The suite itself is, on pure hardware, a different generation of product, and to be fair to BA, the best of their fleet rather than the whole story, since the Club cabin still flying on their A380s is extremely dated in its own right. Another piece for another day; we didn't fly it this time. What we flew was excellent: proper privacy, a door, and real length. I'm just shy of six foot, and fully stretched out in bed mode I can't touch the end without genuinely reaching for it. Once the boys were asleep I got a solid, comfortable five hours myself, which is more than I can usually say for a night flight and more than the Virgin seat would have given me.

But the family experience needed more assembly. Let me be careful and fair here: BA may well have sent us something advising that children's meals needed ordering in advance. If they did, it never registered with us among the booking noise, and I'll own our share of that. But the outcome is the part that matters. We arrived on board, with two children plainly on the reservation, to discover that nothing had been loaded and the boys were left to choose from a menu of distinctly adult options. What actually happened was crisps, and bread rolls we buttered and filled with jam, improvised at 38,000 feet. The contrast is the lesson: Virgin's system made our attention irrelevant by loading kids' meals automatically and unasked; BA's system let one easily-missed step turn into an unfortunate and entirely unnecessary problem in the air. Mercifully we'd fed them properly in the terminal, so nobody starved but "feed them before boarding" shouldn't be the pro tip for a flagship cabin. The crew, to be fair, were pretty good and tried hard with what they had; they simply lacked the resources, and the instinctive touch, of the Virgin team.

The verdict. Two very different flights, and closer overall than either airline would like to hear. If you're travelling on business, the newest of the hardware options for both carriers are far better than the older alternatives. The suite, the privacy and the sleep of the newest BA Club suite is particularly excellent, however with kids these benefits turned into problems. If you're travelling as a family, Virgin's operation is family-ready by default: free seat selection months out, the packs, the auto-loaded kids' meals, crews who treat looking after children as the job rather than an interruption to it. BA can be a fine family product but only if you do the assembly yourself, in advance, and the instructions are easy to miss. This piece would read very differently without the kids, and I will review that separately when the time comes as I fly both carriers quite often. But flying with them, paying my own money, the airline that had thought about my children before I asked is the one that wins out on this family-friendly comparison.