Virgin upgrades more than food for thought Virgin Australia's expanded lounge at Sydney airport. VIRGIN Australia has added free catering to some of its longer flights, but short-haul passengers will still have to pay for food. Qantas has been heavily emphasising its all-inclusive full-service offering in its advertising, and Virgin has responded by upgrading its service on some flights. Virgin's chief customer officer, Mark Hassell, said the airline had spent considerable time looking at the question. While it had seen an opportunity to introduce free food and drinks on longer flights, its research showed a retail offering was a well-accepted part of shorter flights. "Certainly, on our long domestic flying to Perth we went and introduced in September of last year a free-of-charge catered offering which has gone extraordinarily well," he said. So that was something we felt there was a need and a demand for and something that we've introduced. We've also now extended that to some of our short-haul international flying - Denpasar and Phuket - and we're also about to launch in December for Fiji. So where the opportunity exists for us to do that and we can remain competitive on price, that's something we've been looking at closely. Changes were also afoot for those who continued to pay for their food and drinks, according to the customer service chief. "You're going to see a lot of innovation in the way we present retail so that more people access it, more people find it great value for money, more people find it actually a useful part of the inflight experience," he said. Other developments as Virgin rolls out its "game change" program included upgraded lounges and the recent launch of a WiFi entertainment system that allows people to watch television and movies on their laptops, tablets and smartphones. Passengers download and activate an app to allow them to access 300 hours of free content in a system that is the first of its kind in the Asia-Pacific. The airline had been trialling the system for 12 months and had it fitted on 37 aircraft. It expected to have it installed on its domestic and international short-haul fleet by the end of the year. Mr Hassell said customer experience had been at the heart of the game-change program in terms of both product, such as lounges, and service. Virgin has just doubled the size of its flagship Sydney lounge because of the change in the airline's passenger mix and the growth of premium travellers in its Velocity frequent-flyer scheme. With the Sydney lounge now finished and a popular lounge opened in Canberra in March, Mr Hassell said the airline's Melbourne facility would be doubled in size by Christmas. New lounges would also open in Cairns in November and Darwin in the middle of next year. A regional lounge in Perth's Terminal 2 was also expected to open in December. "The lounge story continues to be a very strong and fundamental one," he said. And it's a great reflection on what we're doing that we have to keep expanding . Mr Hassell said Virgin now had five extra A330 gates and a revamped retail offering in Sydney that had changed the terminal's look and feel. He said the new lounge in Melbourne built on a renovation of departure and arrival areas earlier this year while Perth would have a new terminal from next year. "That heralds for us a great opportunity to have brand-new lounge facilities," he said. We've got adjacency to Terminal 2 with a link which is great for transfers domestically and for regional Australia. We're also adjacent to the international terminal, so that gives an unparalleled international transfer proposition with our partners, which is great. Virgin was also working with Brisbane Airport, where gates were being refurbished and the airline was looking at a regional lounge for mining and resource passengers as well as retail experience that echoed Sydney's. But the glue that bound the new offering together, Mr Hassell said, was Virgin's service-oriented staff and their high engagement. "We're blessed by having great people in the business who offer great service," he said, noting that people stop him in the street to comment. So the whole approach of recruiting on attitude and behaviour has borne a lot of fruit for us. Yet the Virgin executive believed there was still opportunity to take the airline's service standards higher. "That's the start of the job," he said. Because we've got that level of engagement, that attitude, that behaviour, the ongoing program change is around taking our people to the next level and beyond through training and development and coaching.