I had to make a airline reservation on a Virgin Blue flight for a friend who was unable to make one on her own. I had used the special number my wife gave me which automatically places me on the first in queue. After a brief automatic message by the announcer of Virgin Blue, things seemed to changed.
Firstly was that the quality of the line dropped dramatically. When speaking to the person on the other line, it sounded like that the telephone call was going overseas.
Secondly the person on the other side had a distinct Asian American English expression about him. Also he was not a friendly as you would normally expect from a Virgin Blue Staff.
Coming up to the completion of the reservation, I asked the telephone operator as to which country where his side of the conversation is at and his reply quickly was the Philippines.
This concludes very much that Virgin Blue are using overseas call centres to operate their reservations. For a company that is so much wanting to becoming Australian with the red planes and blue names to coincide with the Australian terminology of calling a redhead "Bluey" purely shows that they are not doing business according to the Australian tradition.
