US Flights - BA or Virgin Atlantic?

[Sharrilanda]

Fares and flight timings almost identical.
Travelling with one child who is an excellent and frequent flier.

Who would you choose to fly with, this October, London to Washington Dulles?

The last time we went, it was with Virgin.
My sister always flies with BA.

So it’s going to come down to who provides better inflight service, entertainment and food😁

Help me choose please!

American , United or Virgin imho for transatlantic.

BA are woeful - flights late , impossible to contact anyone if any issues and rubbish in flight . Very sad .

Virgin 100%. Really nice stewards with great customer service. We also got a free seat upgrade there and back without even asking on a recent flight to NYC as DH is very tall. Last few years I’ve found BA to be very underwhelming with unfriendly staff.

This - I’d say worth it to clear immigration

FWIW, devil in the details and all that - as I understand it Aer Lingus currently use an Airbus 321 neo on at least some of their Dublin-Dulles non-stoppers....

That's a relatively slow aircraft so it's 9 hours plus flight time Dublin-Dulles according to the Aer Lingus website.

OTOH it's roughly 8 hours London-Dulles with BA and Virgin, so you'd have to consider whether the benefits of pre-clearance outweigh the extended time in the air on a short haul configured aircraft.

Thanks for all the responses and sharing your experiences.

We’ve stuck with what we know and I’ve booked with VA (sorry @goatwata mum 😌)
For the plane nerds amongst us (DC is one 😂) we are flying out in a Boeing 787-9
and returning on an Airbus A330-900NEO.

@notimagain - it’s more that’s removed the queuing for me tbh

Understood.

I haven't been to Dulles for a while but I don't recall the lines there being that bad, certainly nothing like as grim as it can be at JFK...

Yay! A dreamliner! So nice! - comparatively speaking.