Triangle Trip

Seeing the promotions about Virgin America (VX) Wi-Fi aka: Gogo, I had to test it out its on-board Internet service.  The first thing was to book a Wi-Fi enabled flight.  Fortunately, the majority of Virgin America’s flights are Gogo-enabled, and Virgin America’s aim is to enable all their planes by the end of summer 2009.

The cost plan for Virgin America Wifi (Gogo) is as follows:

• $12.95 for flights of 3 hours or more
• $9.95 for flights less than 3 hours

Now for actual speeds, I ran a couple tests from different sites:

Realistically, I browsed a few sites for my own testing purposes.  Virgin’s WiFi download speeds are great.  ESPN and CNN loaded within a few seconds.  Hulu and Youtube could stream video without any interruption.  Upload speeds on the other hand were slow, I tried to upload a 2MB file, and I had to stop it because it took long.

Overall, the Gogo connection is good.  I would pay for Virgin’s Gogo on-board Internet service for a longer flight.  My flight was only an hour and only about 30 minutes of actual use, but anything longer than 1 hour of actual use, I would consider to pre-occupying myself on a Virgin plane.

These days a lot of receipts are sent or displayed electronically.  A great way to archive your receipts is to save them to PDF and place in a separate folder on your computer.  On a Mac this is very simple to do: File -> Print… -> PDF -> Save to PDF.  On Windows, you’ll probably need to install 3rd party software such as CutePDF.

Also, saving your boarding passes to PDF when you check-in online is a good idea as well, especially if you don’t have a printer you can connect to at that specific moment.  Not only that, it’s handy when you need to show proof when your frequent flyer mileage doesn’t post to your mileage account.

I have been flying in and out of SFO for several months but have not had to switch flights from the domestic terminals to the International Terminal. There used to be a bus located at the lower level near Gate 72 that takes you from SFO Terminal 3 to the International terminal. That bus is no longer available.

SFO has completed a connection bridge that takes you from Terminal 3 to the International Terminal. You will need to walk from the gates of Terminal 3 to the SFO International Terminal via this bridge. The walk way connecting SFO’s Terminal 3 and the International Terminal is near Gate 75 (shown in the map below). It would have been great if travelers received information information about the new bridge at SFO.

You can also view my other posts on: How to a quickly check into SFO Terminal 3 and a recently updated post on the time and schedule of when the gates are opened.

Safe travels.