Very unlike Virgin to try and milk a situation for free publicity!
Well my view is it's very clever marketing by Virgin so fair play to them. Not particularly happy the BBC are giving them so much free publicity over a marketing stunt though (commercial channels can do as they wish of course and it makes a nice filler piece for local newspapers). The advertising alone would cost tens of thousands of pounds and getting free publicity on the BBC is priceless.
Virgin Atlantic and VTEC are entirely separate companies. It's extremely likely this was thought about well before the event, it's unlikely in the space of a few hours someone on the social media desk at VTEC thought this would be a good idea, tells his boss, and then manages to get sign off from Virgin Atlantic to offer a free ticket.
It's more likely Virgin Atlantic wanted to raise awareness for their flights to Atlanta (which is mainly there to feed connections with Delta, this route wasn't offered before Delta part owned them) and Richard Branson was spinning up the publicity machine for the Flying Scotsman it made sense for then to do some cross brand promotion. Therefore they probably asked the social media team to look out for someone deserving to give the free flight to so they pick someone who was photobombed and already started trending. It was a fair bet that there'd be people in this situation.
Also as airlines don't issue paper tickets any more having to go to Grantham to 'collect' tickets with a member of both VTEC and VS staff present shows it was all about the publicity.
Interestingly enough no mention of Upper Class/Premium Economy (I'm sure if they were sending him in a premium class they'd be telling us all about it - then again a free upgrade at the airport might be part of the plan to get more press) and no mention of a hotel which would have been a genuinely nice gesture for all the free publicity he's gave them.
All in all it was excellent work by Virgin, they really know how to generate positive publicity but let's not be fooled that this was a charitable move or even an impulse decision.
On another note on that day despite Branson claiming he loves the Flying Scotsman he didn't come over to the UK for the inaugural trip. He still did try to lap up all the credit for its restoration which I think was a bit of an insult to all those other people with smaller bank balances that donated. The cynic in me back in 2004 thought he made the donation to get some good publicity at the expense of his rival GNER as GNER promoted the ECML as "The route of The Flying Scotsman". It's amazing luck that a Virgin branded company happened to be running the ECML when the locomotive restoration was complete.
I
like VTEC (except Nectar) but Branson still winds me up at times when he tries to take credit for things that he only had a small part in, or
when Virgin spun coming 4th and 6th in the Which survey as coming top (by saying franchised long distance when the top two happened to be open access).
!!