I hope that your friend does get a refund from Virgin. However we have friends who had booked a trip with one of the cheapie airlines to Europe and when one of the group had to drop out through illness they said that an alteration like that as it was a group booking made the whole booking invalid and told them that the rest of the party would all have to re-book with no refund of the original fares paid. It has made me wary of booking with those type of airlines.

Andrena