On the two consecutive occasions that an attempt was made to make an online booking on the Virgin Holidays web site, the site would fail during the credit card authorisation. It being early on a Sunday morning, it was hoped that a quick chat to someone in the reservations call centre would complete the booking and ensure that the failed attempts had not incurred any cost. After spending the best part of an hour being held in a queue, the decision was made to give up on Virgin Holidays and book through Kuoni instead.
Several days later a booking confirmation arrived from Virgin Holidays showing that a booking had been made, but that no deposit had been paid. After phoning a booking agent to explain what had happened, it was discovered that the booking had not actually been completed but that the Virgin Holidays computer system sends out incorrect invoices when an online booking fails during credit card authorisation. The agent confirmed that the booking would simply lapse when no funds were forthcoming.
A couple of weeks later another invoice arrived from Virgin Holidays. This showed that yet another booking had been made and that the outstanding balance was £0. Telephoning another booking agent provided confirmation that this was once again a system failure and that the booking would lapse in time.
The biggest concern at this time was that all the bookings made up to this point had selected the same Virgin Atlantic flights and that the situation might arise where these would be considered a system failure and would all be cancelled. After discussing the situation with the Kuoni Concierge service, the actual airline booking reference was obtained providing direct access to the details of the flight on the Virgin Atlantic web site.