having lived & worked in Dubai for 14 years [ we are now back living in the UK] we used to get a free ticket home to UK every year, no expat wanted to fly with BA, truly, they may treat their business class passengers well, but us poor plebs in "cattle class" we not treated with any respect at all, requests were ignored so were the call signs.
when coming home on leave, most ex-pats would say put me on any airline except BA, none of us wanted to "fly the flag" thank you very much.
At that time Emirates were the best, but Virgin didnt go there then and I have never had a bad Virgin flight to anywhere.