Airline: Virgin America

Nope, no details about California yet as I'm kinda waiting until I can post the pictures too. Instead, it's a review on how we got there. I'd never been on Virgin America prior to this trip and given that I like Virgin Atlantic and the ticket was half the cost of United, we decided it was time. Here are my thoughts based on a non-stop flights from IAD to SFO and back.

• Price - Let's face it, this is the reason why most people choose their airlines. A round-trip ticket to SFO for $350/person is hard to beat.
  
• People - They definitely recruit a younger, hipper crowd than the older airlines. I'm pretty sure a few of the fight attendants were younger than me and a couple of the women were fairly attractive. It was weird to see pilots in a just black dress shirt and pants though. Everyone at check-in and the gates were polite, if not too energetic, and the limited flight schedule helped minimize lines.
  
• Plane Layout - They have both bathrooms at the back with the doors opening to where the crew and galley are. It's not that big of a deal until you have 3 crew and 4 people trying to work around each other to get where they need to go. It reminded me of a college party where there's lots of very personal parts touching those of complete strangers and you either enjoy it or are skeeved by it. The shelves of bottled water available for anyone to grab is a nice touch though.
  
• Seats - Unable to use my trusty "upgrade every flight on United" trick, we had to slum it with the cattle in economy. I opted to pay extra for exit row so I can't speak to the regular economy seats. The legroom in the exit rows was worth it for a cross country flight but be wary of the window seat as the armrest is part of the window and raised a bit. It's not exactly what I imagined given the description on SeatGuru but at least the site warned us of the other exit row's seats not reclining. Row 10 is actually ideal because the row in front can't come back on you and you can still hose the person behind you. If you fly any distance on V-Am, go aisle on row 10.
  
• Entertainment - I was pretty excited about Red, their in-flight entertainment system, but unfortunately it didn't live up to the hype. Live TV is awesome but all the channels I cared about (ESPN, ESPN2, etc) didn't work for most of the flight. I wasn't going to pay $7 to see a movie on a 9" screen and definitely wasn't paying $1 to watch episodes of Family Guy. The games were cool but I even got bored with Doom after 3 levels. The chat room functions didn't work the whole way to CA and no one was using them on the way back. I think it's a neat idea but I'm not sure it will ever be useful unless you're not sitting with your friends/family. I think the real value will come once they enable SMS and email. Ordering a drink with it is neat, even if I can't get a lousy fork without buying a $5 snackbox.
  

I think my expectations were too high. Having been spoiled over recent years by my ability to continually upgrade seats, my perspective is likely skewed. (I tried to get a free upgrade to First Class but alas, they denied me.) I wanted a really nice domestic carrier that had all sorts of cool things to impress me. In the end it ended up being what it likely was designed to be... a budget carrier that has a bit more creature comforts than others in the market. To be clear: It's really not at all bad, it's just not anything special.