Dear Richard Branson
I saw last year (I think it was?) you reply to a customer complaint email personally thus garnering you worldwide chain-mail Internet fame and much kudos with your ‘hey that guy is just like us’ viral marketing.
That is partially why I am trying a similar tact and writing to you now in this open format.
I sit here typing this on my iPhone (no endorsements were received or made during the making of this deranged rant) using a free wireless connection at Abu Dhabi airport. At least I think I am at Abu Dhabi airport. I could be wrong because I am that tired. Why am I that tired? Oh perhaps because I spent the last 13 hour flight on one of your subsidiary airlines Virgin Australia being violently rocked to sleep by the piercing screams of children I do not know or care much for. Don’t get me wrong I love children – just when they aren’t doing their best to keep me uncomfortably awake during a stupidly long flight for which I must sleep on because I hope to arrive in London in the early morning and need to establish myself with their timezone to avoid jet lag.
I am sure you probably get complaints like this all the time and am also sure it is probably not isolated to your airline or its subsidiaries. But I would also like to point out that there seems to be the frequent problem that some poor schmuck always gets stuck with the kids or as my partner so eloquently puts it ‘The mid-air nursery’.
Mr Branson I realise you are a very busy man and have such exciting and ground breaking ventures as commercial flights to space and the moon. But I beg of you. How about redirecting the money you are spending on making such ventures happen to some development and research into how to overcome the long standing issue of ‘poor schmucks who get stuck amongst an entire row of screaming children’. I mean – who really wants to go to the moon anyway? (Other than astronauts obviously). I can think of numerous films about trips to the moon or space that did not end well for the travellers in question. There is Apollo 13 – which didn’t look like a fun time for Tom Hanks but at least he didn’t get stranded on an island I guess. Oh yea also Apollo 18, the travellers died in that one (oops spoiler alert) because apparently the moon is full of rocks that turn into evil crab things. I’m not sure you want that kind of bad press about your company – at least not until Jet Star tries it and gets burned for it first.
Also the moon just doesn’t really seem that easy to market? It doesn’t really have beaches or a Big Ben or an Eiffel Tower. It could be a tax haven I guess but we already have those on earth. I just can’t see how you are going to make any money out of this? Or how you will recoup your losses for such a massive R&D investment?
Once again I beg of you, lead the way amongst airlines and do something new. Do something about this screaming babies on airplanes thing. Why whilst I was adjusting my earplugs for the five billionth time I thought of the simple idea that –
Hey. Why don’t they have one special flight per week just for families and children. Like they do with matinee movie sessions sometimes?
Or.
Why don’t they cordon of the area of the plane assigned for families and children and attempt to make it as soundproof as possible?
I stopped short at special spaceman suits to put the kids in to keep them quiet because I realised it might give you moon ideas again.
I had better cut this off now as I think I can see shimmering crocodiles floating across the screen and my eyes are demanding they shut.
Sleep deprivation – it’s a thing.
Richard Branson, please help us.
Signed
The exhausted travellers who get stuck sitting amongst other people’s screaming children on long haul flights.