Virgin Atlantic Passenger’s “Culinary Journey of Hell”

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We’ve written about complaint letters in the past:

• The complaining business class passenger who got what was coming to him
• The hotel owner who reamed a guest for their complaint
• The sneaky way an airport ended passengers’ complaints about long waits

And, of course, there was that classic complaint letter to Ryanair that some thought was THE FUNNIEST complaint letter to an airline, ever.

Until now.

I missed this gem, which was written in 2009. But apparently a Virgin Atlantic passenger named Oliver Beale was on a 10-hour flight from Mumbai to Heathrow and had what he called a “culinary journey of hell.”

Beale was (maybe still is? I mean, the letter IS from nearly 14 years ago) an art director who worked at a London advertising agency. I suspect his creative easily transferred from pictorial to written form. Because this is the letter Mr. Beale wrote to Sir Richard Branson, the majority owner of Virgin Atlantic, and founder of the entire Virgin Group.

Dear Mr Branson

REF: Mumbai to Heathrow, 7th December 2008

I love the Virgin brand, I really do, which is why I continue to use it despite a series of unfortunate incidents over the last few years. This latest incident takes the biscuit. Ironically, by the end of the flight I would have gladly paid over a thousand rupees for a single biscuit following the culinary journey of hell I was subjected to at the hands of your corporation. Look at this Richard. Just look at it:

I imagine the same questions are racing through your brilliant mind as were racing through mine on that fateful day. “What is this?” “Why have I been given it?” “What have I done to deserve this?” And: “Which one is the starter, which one is the dessert?” You don’t get to a position like yours, Richard, with anything less than a generous sprinkling of observational power, so I KNOW you will have spotted the tomato next to the two yellow shafts of sponge on the left. Yes, it’s next to the sponge shaft without the green paste. That’s got to be the clue hasn’t it. No sane person would serve a dessert with a tomato, would they? Well, answer me this, Richard: what sort of animal would serve a dessert with peas in:

I know it looks like a bhaji but it’s in custard, Richard. Custard. It must be the pudding. Well you’ll be fascinated to hear that it wasn’t custard. It was a sour gel with a clear oil on top. Its only redeeming feature was that it managed to be so alien to my palate that it took away the taste of the curry emanating from our miscellaneous central cuboid of beige matter. Perhaps the meal on the left might be the desert after all.

Anyway, this is all irrelevant at the moment. I was raised strictly but neatly by my parents and if they knew I had started dessert before the main course, a sponge shaft would be the least of my worries. So let’s peel back the tin-foil on the main dish and see what’s on offer.

I’ll try and explain how this felt. Imagine being 12 years old, Richard. Now imagine it’s Christmas morning and you’re sat there with your final present to open. It’s a big one, and you know what it is. It’s that Goodmans stereo you picked from the catalogue and wrote to Santa about. Only you open the present and it’s not in there. It’s your hamster, Richard. It’s your hamster in the box and it’s not breathing. That’s how I felt when I peeled back the foil and saw this:

Now, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking it’s more of that Bhaji custard. I admit I thought the same too, but no. It’s mustard, Richard. MUSTARD. More mustard than any person could consume in a month. On the left we have a piece of broccoli and some peppers in a brown glue-like oil and on the right the chef had prepared some mashed potato. The potato masher had obviously broken and so it was decided the next best thing would be to pass the potatoes through the digestive tract of a bird. Once regurgitated it was clearly then blended and mixed with a bit of mustard. Everybody likes a bit of mustard, Richard.

By now I was actually starting to feel a little hypoglycaemic. I needed a sugar hit. Luckily there was a small cookie provided. It had caught my eye earlier due to its baffling presentation:

It appears to be in an evidence bag from the scene of a crime. A CRIME AGAINST BLOODY COOKING. Either that or some sort of back-street underground cookie, purchased from a gun-toting maniac high on his own supply of yeast. You certainly wouldn’t want to be caught carrying one of these through customs. Imagine biting into a piece of brass, Richard. That would be softer on the teeth than the specimen above.

I was exhausted. All I wanted to do was relax, but obviously I had to sit with that mess in front of me for half an hour. I swear the sponge shafts moved at one point.

Once cleared, I decided to relax with a bit of your world-famous onboard entertainment. I switched it on:

I apologise for the quality of the photo, but it was incredibly hard to capture Boris Johnson’s face through the flickering white lines running up and down the screen. Perhaps it would be better on another channel:

Is that Ray Liotta? A question I found myself asking over and over throughout the gruelling half-hour I attempted to watch the film like this. After that, I switched off. I’d had enough. I was the hungriest I’d been in my adult life and I had a splitting headache from squinting at a crackling screen.

My only option was to simply stare at the seat in front and wait for either food, or sleep. Neither came for an incredibly long time. But when it did, it surpassed my wildest expectations:

Yes! It’s another crime-scene cookie. Only this time you dunk it in the white stuff.

Richard – What is that white stuff? It looked like it was going to be yoghurt. It finally dawned on me what it was after staring at it. It was a mixture of the Bhaji custard and the Mustard sauce. It reminded me of my first week at university. I had overheard that you could make a drink by mixing vodka and refreshers. I lied to my new friends and told them I’d done it loads of times. When I attempted to make the drink in a big bowl it formed a cheese Richard. A cheese. That cheese looked a lot like your bhaji-mustard.

So that was that, Richard. I didn’t eat a bloody thing. My only question is: How can you live like this? I can’t imagine what dinner round your house is like – it must be like something out of a nature documentary.

As I said at the start, I love your brand, I really do. It’s just a shame such a simple thing could bring it crashing to its knees and begging for sustenance.

Yours sincerely,

Oliver Beale

The letter was so well done that, at the time, several entities thought it might have been written by Virgin Atlantic itself, as a “any PR is good PR” sort of stunt. But CNN confirmed that, “Both he [Beale] and Virgin have insisted the letter, described as possibly “the world’s best passenger complaint,” is authentic.

And did Richard ever see the letter? Well, The Telegraph reported that Paul Charles, Virgin’s Director of Corporate Communications at the time (he’s now the CEO at The PC Agency), confirmed that Sir Richard Branson wound up calling Oliver Beale and thanked him for his “constructive, if tongue-in-cheek” email. Mr Charles said that Virgin was sorry Mr. Beale didn’t like the in-flight meals, which he said was, “award-winning food which is very popular on our Indian routes.”

Beale confirmed that Sir Richard called him. At the time, he told Daily Express that, “He was incredibly nice about the whole thing but I haven’t received any compensation since talking to him.”

Still, best complaint letter to an airline EVER. It was so good that British actor Himesh Patel read the letter as part of a Letters Live show in March, 2020.

Feature Photo: Richard Branson / Facebook

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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary