Upgrade Offer Question

[maybere]

Does being offered to bid on an upgrade cabin mean that those cabins are actually available to bid on? I find it hard to believe the cabins I am bidding on are available for the Christmas Hawaii cruise since most cabins are sold out, and if they were available when I booked last month, I would have purchased one of them!

 

Thanks,

Eric

[imakemistaeks]

I'm by no means an expert on this but just throwing out my thoughts.

 

I would think that if they throw out upgrade offers to a lot of people and they get accepted, their cabin opens up. For example, if I'm in an interior cabin and get upgrade offers for an oceanview and a balcony but balcony is sold out, one of those parties booked in the balcony cabin is getting an upgrade offer for an open mini suite or larger balcony. They bid, get accepted, then that balcony cabin is open and I potentially can get it.

 

They also use those upgrade e-mails to get data on what people are willing to pay for upgrades.

 

Also, things happen and people cancel last minute. The cruise line will want to get more money before sailing if they can.

[NutsAboutGolf]

24 minutes ago, imakemistaeks said:

I'm by no means an expert on this but just throwing out my thoughts.

 

I would think that if they throw out upgrade offers to a lot of people and they get accepted, their cabin opens up. For example, if I'm in an interior cabin and get upgrade offers for an oceanview and a balcony but balcony is sold out, one of those parties booked in the balcony cabin is getting an upgrade offer for an open mini suite or larger balcony. They bid, get accepted, then that balcony cabin is open and I potentially can get it.

 

They also use those upgrade e-mails to get data on what people are willing to pay for upgrades.

 

Also, things happen and people cancel last minute. The cruise line will want to get more money before sailing if they can.

 

This is accurate.  The simple way to explain it, the software analyzes every bid/upgrade scenario for maximum revenue; the company always wins, sometimes the passengers wins with an upgrade.  It's not even NCL who manages the software, it's a 3rd party company called PlusGrade, they deal with many other companies, mostly airlines but also RCCL and X.

[maybere]

I am bidding the highest cabin available, which I think is weird, because I thought the same thing you did imakemistaeks

 

[NutsAboutGolf]

Scrubbing various datapoints, all that seems to be accurate is that large bids can be accepted well before the bidding deadline and that there are a lot of upgrades that happen two days before sailing.  Pure speculation, it makes sense to allow people to bid on say the owners suite even if it's booked because in the event that the original owner suite passengers has an emergency and can't make it, at 48 hours NCL/PlusGrade can collect even more revenue by reselling it.  Additional, it gives NCL/PlusGrade valuable data to determine how much people are willing to bid on a certain cabin despite it already being booked.

[imakemistaeks]

1 hour ago, maybere said:

I am bidding the highest cabin available, which I think is weird, because I thought the same thing you did imakemistaeks

 

At that point, if those cabins are sold out, I would imagine it would be either 1. in case someone cancels or 2. getting data.

[WestfieldTraveler]

There could even be a calculation of how many cabins to hold back for the bidding process as I'm sure there are a few passengers every cruise that really overbid.