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What was your upgrade offer and what did you bid


bklynfinest77
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Mine is 08/18/2018 the cruise no longer populates, only the 08/09 with everything but insides sold out and 08/27 with only the solos showing sold out, every other category has inventory on the 08/27 date

So anyone who placed upgrade bids on the 08/18 your chances are just about zero percent, only hope is cancellation and I'm sure there won't be many of those[/quote

 

Strange, if I put in Warnemude for my dates, same cruise but second day so 08/19 and people can embark there, it shows available cabins, no rhyme, no reason note to self, stop mock booking lol

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With all this bidding malarkey I feel NCL play a big part in it even though I have only recently learned that it is an outside company that deal with the upgrade bidding process. Why offer out so much if it's not available? yes to make money but it wont actually make them that much if they are actually sold out and no one cancels? Yes it may make people want to upgrade, but most are happy with what they book ( that's why they book it most of the time) My experience so far with NCL is I was offered to bid on 4 Haven caterogies and a mini suite ( we are in a balcony) sorry I don't know all the different codes used for rooms as I use names for rooms and this is only our 3rd cruise;p but so far my thinking is NCL show rooms as sold out as a con to make you want to try and bid when in actual fact they are not! On our past 2 cruises the Haven was never sold out ( our daughter made good friends there) even though it was school hols for us. Whatever it is I am playing this game and hoping for some bit of luck on our cruise in August as we really need some good luck at the mo!:D

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With all this bidding malarkey I feel NCL play a big part in it even though I have only recently learned that it is an outside company that deal with the upgrade bidding process. Why offer out so much if it's not available? yes to make money but it wont actually make them that much if they are actually sold out and no one cancels? Yes it may make people want to upgrade, but most are happy with what they book ( that's why they book it most of the time) My experience so far with NCL is I was offered to bid on 4 Haven caterogies and a mini suite ( we are in a balcony) sorry I don't know all the different codes used for rooms as I use names for rooms and this is only our 3rd cruise;p but so far my thinking is NCL show rooms as sold out as a con to make you want to try and bid when in actual fact they are not! On our past 2 cruises the Haven was never sold out ( our daughter made good friends there) even though it was school hols for us. Whatever it is I am playing this game and hoping for some bit of luck on our cruise in August as we really need some good luck at the mo!:D

Agree with your post . It must make ncl's evil heart fill with joy to hear that someone who calls their system malarkey is still going to use their scheme .

Good luck!s

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With all this bidding malarkey I feel NCL play a big part in it even though I have only recently learned that it is an outside company that deal with the upgrade bidding process. Why offer out so much if it's not available? yes to make money but it wont actually make them that much if they are actually sold out and no one cancels? Yes it may make people want to upgrade, but most are happy with what they book ( that's why they book it most of the time) My experience so far with NCL is I was offered to bid on 4 Haven caterogies and a mini suite ( we are in a balcony) sorry I don't know all the different codes used for rooms as I use names for rooms and this is only our 3rd cruise;p but so far my thinking is NCL show rooms as sold out as a con to make you want to try and bid when in actual fact they are not! On our past 2 cruises the Haven was never sold out ( our daughter made good friends there) even though it was school hols for us. Whatever it is I am playing this game and hoping for some bit of luck on our cruise in August as we really need some good luck at the mo!:D

 

Your logic is deeply flawed. Why in the world would NCL show Havens as sold out if they aren't when they can book them straight out to people for $1000+ more than what they would get for a minimum bid? On a cruise I am looking at booking now, balconies are available for as little as $749. Minimum bid from balcony to the lowest level Haven is $400. That means someone who wins a bid could pay as little as $1149. The cheapest Haven can be booked direct for $2799. What possible motivation would NCL have to show that Haven as sold out and miss out on a chance of someone paying the full $2799 for it so they could convince someone to put in a bid to pay $1650 less?

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How soon after your upgrade did you get your cabin assignment? I know it can be up to the day of sailing, but since we have to print new tags and tag our own luggage in Seattle, I am hoping we get a room assignment next week.

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How soon after your upgrade did you get your cabin assignment? I know it can be up to the day of sailing, but since we have to print new tags and tag our own luggage in Seattle, I am hoping we get a room assignment next week.

Within 2 hours of bid acceptance, porters at terminal have blank tags and can write in the cabin number.

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How soon after your upgrade did you get your cabin assignment? I know it can be up to the day of sailing, but since we have to print new tags and tag our own luggage in Seattle, I am hoping we get a room assignment next week.

 

i go on sunday and my bids are still pending lol

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With all this bidding malarkey I feel NCL play a big part in it even though I have only recently learned that it is an outside company that deal with the upgrade bidding process. Why offer out so much if it's not available? yes to make money but it wont actually make them that much if they are actually sold out and no one cancels? Yes it may make people want to upgrade, but most are happy with what they book ( that's why they book it most of the time) My experience so far with NCL is I was offered to bid on 4 Haven caterogies and a mini suite ( we are in a balcony) sorry I don't know all the different codes used for rooms as I use names for rooms and this is only our 3rd cruise;p but so far my thinking is NCL show rooms as sold out as a con to make you want to try and bid when in actual fact they are not! On our past 2 cruises the Haven was never sold out ( our daughter made good friends there) even though it was school hols for us. Whatever it is I am playing this game and hoping for some bit of luck on our cruise in August as we really need some good luck at the mo!:D

Yes it is a game that NCL has suckered most of us, including me, into,

On the more popular sailings a few lucky people will win the bid but most of us wont.

I have bids in for a 2 bedroom Haven, which I doubt I will win, to book that cabin outright would have added another 10K to the price, uh nope don't need the luxury for a 9 day port intensive cruise at that price, it's another cruise.

Also if I try a mock booking the available cabins are entirely different between Copenhagen and Warnemude, both ports of embarkation, one on the 18th, one on the 19th. Copenhagen only has DOS and 2 bedrooms, Warnemude only has Courtyard penthouse, go figure, it's a game :)

So I play the game, but will be happy in my mini suite with large balcony!!

Edited by njkate
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Congrats! May I asked what sailing? What category did you come from to the Haven? And, what range did you bid...low/fair/good/excellent...?

 

See signature below for date of sailing.

We are currently booked in a mini-suite with large balcony, deck 8.

NOT excellent! That would have been more than if I had just booked it myself. I split the difference between the current fare of the category we were interested in and what we had already paid for our trip.

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From all the reading here it appears bids being accepted is totally random and no relationship to bid being good, fair, poor, excellent? Common sense says bid the max for best chance to win, but I'm seeing posts that people bid low on a sold out category and still won? Is there any logic or knowledge here?

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It's a game :) You play the game, you takes your chances ;) Simple as that.

Yup kind of like the lottery, if your name or reservation number or how ever they do it is pulled you hit the jack pot

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From all the reading here it appears bids being accepted is totally random and no relationship to bid being good, fair, poor, excellent? Common sense says bid the max for best chance to win, but I'm seeing posts that people bid low on a sold out category and still won? Is there any logic or knowledge here?

 

There is definitely logic being applied, but it's on a per cruise basis. While a low bid might win an upgrade on one cruise, a max bid might not win an upgrade on the next cruise. It's really quite simple on the NCL end, it's just not evident to us on the consumer end, because we do not see all of the behind-the-scenes data.

 

On the NCL end, they want to make as much money as they possibly can. The will accept/reject bids in a manor that maximizes their earnings. Here's a little scenario to demonstrate how things might look arbitrary from our perspective, but makes perfect sense from NCL's money-making perspective.

  • Couple A purchases an inside room for $699 per person, for a total of $1398.
  • Couple B purchases an ocean view room for $749 per person, for a total of $1498.
  • Couple C purchases a balcony for $1199 per person, for a total of $2398.

First of all, how much all of these couples paid for their initial booking is completely irrelevant. NCL already has that money. All they care about now is how much MORE money they can get out of these couples for their bids. The only scenario I can possibly imagine in which NCL *might* factor in the initial fare is if there were a "tie" in the bidding process and they needed some piece of data to break that tie. I also assume that NCL's third-party partner that handles bidding might track the initial fare to get some sense of whether people who pay more/less up front are more inclined to make higher/lower bids. So it is useful for data mining and predictive analytics.

 

Now, let's move on to the next step in our scenario, the bidding process:

  • Couple A gets to bid on an upgrade to an ocean view and a balcony. They bid $100 pp for the ocean view and $200 pp for the balcony.
  • Couple B gets to bid on an upgrade to a balcony and a mini-suite. They bid $150 pp for the balcony.
  • Couple C gets to bid on a mini-suite and the Haven suites. They bid $1200 pp for a Haven.

Now we come down to a few days before the sailing and NCL processes the bids:

  • Couple A gets upgraded to an ocean view.
  • Couple B gets upgraded to a balcony.
  • Couple C gets upgraded to the Haven.

They come to post on this site and all we are told is that Couple A went from an inside to an ocean view for $100 pp, Couple B wend from an ocean view to a balcony for $150 pp, and Couple C went to a Haven for $1200pp.

 

Couple A might be mad because they bid more for the balcony upgrade than Couple B did, but they got stuck in an ocean view room. What they don't see is that it was more profitable for NCL to upgrade Couple B to the balcony vacated by couple C and then upgrade Couple A to the ocean view vacated by Couple B. NCL has now made $100 pp from couple A plus $150 pp from Couple B for a total of $500. Whereas, had they just accepted Couple A's $200 pp offer on a balcony and left Couple B in their ocean view room, NCL would have only made $400.

 

Now, scale that out to the entire ship... potentially hundreds, if not thousands of bids. Since we only hear a couple of accounts from each sailing (if that) on these forums, we aren't getting anything near the whole picture. Plus, add in other complicating factors like more people per stateroom, or the actual distribution of weight on the ship dictating which staterooms should be filled or left empty and there is just FAR too much information that we are lacking here on the forums.

 

I don't think NCL is playing mind games and making some staterooms appear to be sold out when they aren't just to try to trick us into bidding more. I legitimately believe that if a stateroom appears to us to be sold out, it's because it currently *is* or it is on hold. But NCL is still more than happy to take your bids, because up until the very last second, they don't know if there will be a cancellation or if someone will get upgraded and therefor vacate that room. Plus, by taking your bids on sold out rooms, they are still getting valuable data for their predictive analytics that help them make future decisions on pricing.

 

I think that at the moment NCL or their third-party partner runs the algorithms to process the bids, they are simply trying to squeeze as much money out of the sailing as they possibly can. I also think that they might auto-accept some very high bids further out from the sale date in order to "lock in" those bids. For instance, if someone bids high on a balcony and NCL is about to drop the price on those balconies because of poor sales, they might go ahead and accept the high bid on the balcony while they have it so the passenger doesn't lower their bid once they see that prices are dropping.

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There is definitely logic being applied, but it's on a per cruise basis. While a low bid might win an upgrade on one cruise, a max bid might not win an upgrade on the next cruise. It's really quite simple on the NCL end, it's just not evident to us on the consumer end, because we do not see all of the behind-the-scenes data.

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I think that at the moment NCL or their third-party partner runs the algorithms to process the bids, they are simply trying to squeeze as much money out of the sailing as they possibly can. I also think that they might auto-accept some very high bids further out from the sale date in order to "lock in" those bids. For instance, if someone bids high on a balcony and NCL is about to drop the price on those balconies because of poor sales, they might go ahead and accept the high bid on the balcony while they have it so the passenger doesn't lower their bid once they see that prices are dropping.

 

Very good explanation. Were you a math/statistics major? Very sound logic used here.

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There is definitely logic being applied, but it's on a per cruise basis. While a low bid might win an upgrade on one cruise, a max bid might not win an upgrade on the next cruise. It's really quite simple on the NCL end, it's just not evident to us on the consumer end, because we do not see all of the behind-the-scenes data.

 

On the NCL end, they want to make as much money as they possibly can. The will accept/reject bids in a manor that maximizes their earnings. Here's a little scenario to demonstrate how things might look arbitrary from our perspective, but makes perfect sense from NCL's money-making perspective.

  • Couple A purchases an inside room for $699 per person, for a total of $1398.
  • Couple B purchases an ocean view room for $749 per person, for a total of $1498.
  • Couple C purchases a balcony for $1199 per person, for a total of $2398.

First of all, how much all of these couples paid for their initial booking is completely irrelevant. NCL already has that money. All they care about now is how much MORE money they can get out of these couples for their bids. The only scenario I can possibly imagine in which NCL *might* factor in the initial fare is if there were a "tie" in the bidding process and they needed some piece of data to break that tie. I also assume that NCL's third-party partner that handles bidding might track the initial fare to get some sense of whether people who pay more/less up front are more inclined to make higher/lower bids. So it is useful for data mining and predictive analytics.

 

Now, let's move on to the next step in our scenario, the bidding process:

  • Couple A gets to bid on an upgrade to an ocean view and a balcony. They bid $100 pp for the ocean view and $200 pp for the balcony.
  • Couple B gets to bid on an upgrade to a balcony and a mini-suite. They bid $150 pp for the balcony.
  • Couple C gets to bid on a mini-suite and the Haven suites. They bid $1200 pp for a Haven.

Now we come down to a few days before the sailing and NCL processes the bids:

  • Couple A gets upgraded to an ocean view.
  • Couple B gets upgraded to a balcony.
  • Couple C gets upgraded to the Haven.

They come to post on this site and all we are told is that Couple A went from an inside to an ocean view for $100 pp, Couple B wend from an ocean view to a balcony for $150 pp, and Couple C went to a Haven for $1200pp.

 

Couple A might be mad because they bid more for the balcony upgrade than Couple B did, but they got stuck in an ocean view room. What they don't see is that it was more profitable for NCL to upgrade Couple B to the balcony vacated by couple C and then upgrade Couple A to the ocean view vacated by Couple B. NCL has now made $100 pp from couple A plus $150 pp from Couple B for a total of $500. Whereas, had they just accepted Couple A's $200 pp offer on a balcony and left Couple B in their ocean view room, NCL would have only made $400.

 

Now, scale that out to the entire ship... potentially hundreds, if not thousands of bids. Since we only hear a couple of accounts from each sailing (if that) on these forums, we aren't getting anything near the whole picture. Plus, add in other complicating factors like more people per stateroom, or the actual distribution of weight on the ship dictating which staterooms should be filled or left empty and there is just FAR too much information that we are lacking here on the forums.

 

I don't think NCL is playing mind games and making some staterooms appear to be sold out when they aren't just to try to trick us into bidding more. I legitimately believe that if a stateroom appears to us to be sold out, it's because it currently *is* or it is on hold. But NCL is still more than happy to take your bids, because up until the very last second, they don't know if there will be a cancellation or if someone will get upgraded and therefor vacate that room. Plus, by taking your bids on sold out rooms, they are still getting valuable data for their predictive analytics that help them make future decisions on pricing.

 

I think that at the moment NCL or their third-party partner runs the algorithms to process the bids, they are simply trying to squeeze as much money out of the sailing as they possibly can. I also think that they might auto-accept some very high bids further out from the sale date in order to "lock in" those bids. For instance, if someone bids high on a balcony and NCL is about to drop the price on those balconies because of poor sales, they might go ahead and accept the high bid on the balcony while they have it so the passenger doesn't lower their bid once they see that prices are dropping.

Great post. Thank you

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Very good explanation. Were you a math/statistics major? Very sound logic used here.

 

No, but I am a web developer/programmer so I do have a lot of familiarity with databases and information processing. Also, as you can see by my screen name, I pride myself on my logic. :D

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