What Cruise Lines Don’t Want Us To Know About Cabin Upgrade Bidding

Most cruisers bidding for a cabin upgrade think it’s like bidding at an auction, or on eBay, and the highest bid wins. It doesn’t! But that’s not the only starting discovery I made while exploring the secretive, and slightly murky world, of cabin upgrade bidding.

Welcome aboard, I’m Gary Bembridge. Like me, I’m sure you get emails in the run-up to every cruise offering the chance to bid for a cabin upgrade.

After discovering a fellow cruiser succeeded getting upgraded to the cabin grade I’d unsuccessfully bid for but with a lower bid than mine, I set off to investigate how it really works. Clearly something is going on that I was missing. And I thought if I could find out what, my chance of successfully bidding in the future would increase.

On pulling up the bidding emails from 11 different cruise lines I’d received, I realised I’d missed something startling. The emails and the bidding page they led to not only looked surprisingly similar, but they all had a “powered by Plusgrade” notification buried in them too.

This means the cruise lines are not managing cabin upgrades themselves, but are using a third-party company, Plusgrade, instead. It raised the question of why, and what I discovered changed the way that I bid for upgrades, and it should for you too.

Who is Plusgrade?

Plusgrade is a Canadian tech company who work with over 250 airlines, hotels, cruise lines, and passenger rail companies on their upgrade programs.

They apparently have developed a sophisticated machine learning model that is able to pull in data like demand, bidding patterns, passenger segments, and works out bid ranges by cabin grade that will maximise revenue across the ship for each specific sailing.

Although it sounds counter intuitive, the system has worked out the lines can maximise revenue by not always taking the highest bid.

So, the assumption we passengers make that if we bid high, we increase our chance of winning is not true.

Let me explain how the system and line approaches upgrade bidding.

The aim is for the cruise line to take the most money it can on a sailing, ideally by selling every cabin at every grade.

But if they cannot and have unsold cabins, they use the upgrade bidding system to free up as many of the cabin types they know they can resell. The people in those cabins they want to free up may not be the people placing the highest bids.

The Plusgrade system asks, “If I move passengers in cabin X, will it make the cruise line more money overall? Or if I move passengers in cabin Y, will it make the cruise line more money overall?”

Here is a simple example to explain.

Assume I’m in an Inside Cabin that I paid $500 for, and you’re in an Oceanview cabin you paid $700 for.

We both bid for a balcony cabin upgrade. I bid $400 for the upgrade, and you bid $500 for the same balcony cabin grade.

You bid $100 more than me. If this was a straight auction, you would win.

But it isn’t.

It all depends on what the demand shows or suggests the cruise line can do with our respective cabins.

Let’s assume that tells them they could sell my Inside cabin easily, and at the same $500 I originally paid, but there is no demand for your Oceanview cabin, and they could not resell it.

The system would then accept my bid, even though it’s lower than your bid. Why?

Because the cruise line will make more revenue overall. They would take $1,400 by accepting my bid. My original $500 fare, plus $400 for the upgrade, plus $500 fare from reselling my cabin.

But if they accept your bid, they will take $200 less revenue as they would only take $1,200. The $700 fare for your cabin plus the $500 from the bid.

Obviously in practice this is more complicated and shows why they need a sophisticated system like Plusgrade that can factor in all the permutations and implications of multiple options and cascade the effects of moving multiple people up through all the grades to find the combination that maximises revenue.

But one key implication for us is when bidding, we need to consider our current cabin and how attractive it is going to be to the line to have us vacate it on that sailing.

If demand for our current cabin grade is high, perhaps as the line have oversold guaranteed fares for our grade or the sailing is popular and sold out or showing our grades as “waitlisted”, we are going to be more successful in bidding if there are higher grade cabins free.

In simple terms, the lower grades on a ship are easiest for the line to resell. So, Inside and Oceanview cabins on larger ships and entry-level balcony cabins on more premium smaller ships.

Though, if you are in a prime location balcony cabin (mid-ship, not under or near or noisy venues, or you’ve got an aft cabin), these are also usually in high demand and prime for upgrade bids to succeed.

Knowing this, if I can see on an upcoming cruise Inside and Oceanview and lower grade balcony cabins are sold out, but higher-grade balcony and suites are not, this is a good cruise to bid for an upgrade. The line will want to be shuffling people up to the slow selling higher grades to release more easier to sell lower priced cabins.

But what level to bid?

The challenge remains of what level to bid.

While being the highest bid is not essential, it still needs to be high enough.

The slider scale used when bidding encourages us to bid high, using words like “poor”, “fair”, “good”, “strong”, and “excellent”. But these are emotional triggers designed to get us to bid as high as possible based on what the Plusgrade system thinks people on our sailing are prepared to go.

It seems from what I can establish that the minimum is best ignored, and the maximum is almost certainly unnecessary, and often higher or at least the same to just pay to upgrade. So, the middle to upper middle apparently has the greatest chance of success.

But before bidding any amount, check what it will cost you to just simply pay to upgrade. I’ve met several people who bid and paid more this way than just paying to upgrade through their travel agent or the cruise line.

I have some other watch outs and tips when bidding.

Watch Outs And Tricks

When you place your bid, use an odd number because most people use a round number. So, even a couple of dollars above a round number could be the thing that sways it for you.

1. Just because you get an upgrade email, it doesn’t mean there are any cabins available in the grade you’re bidding for. For example, at the time of making this, I’m about to go on a Celebrity cruise, and all the grades above me that are being asked to bid for are showing waitlisted. But they’re storing up bids in case of any last-minute cancellations that could free up rooms.
2. Couples and solo travellers are more likely to have bids accepted than a family or friends sharing a cabin because there are more cabins available for two.
3. The bid price you offer is a per person price. So, you will pay double that. And if you’re solo, you’re going to be paying twice the amount bid too.
4. The earliest you’re going to hear if you have failed or even won a bid is three to four weeks out, mostly if you’re bidding on the higher grades as by then they are unlikely to sell those high-level suites at last minute. But in most cases, you hear as little as 48 hours before embarkation when they factor in last-minute cancellations and they run a final shuffle of everybody between grades working from top down to maximise their revenue. However, if you have not received an email before embarkation day, there is chance you might find as you check in an upgrade. So, until you get an email, it means the bid is still live.
5. The minute the system accepts your bid, your Credit Card is charged, and you lose the cabin you had originally. You have no say in the cabin. Once they have moved you, you cannot change your mind and go back to the old cabin. Your old cabin will have been released, likely to someone has bid on it. So even if you don’t like the new cabin, you have no choice.So, for example, on that Celebrity cruise I was talking about, I was in a balcony cabin, I was offered to bid on a range of suites. I only bid on one grade because I know that none of those have interconnecting doors, which is a no-no for me.
6. You usually will not get any of perks of the next grade, unless moving to a suite, but should keep any packages or perks that you had paid for or had bought previously linked to the original cabin.

As upgrade bidding is so hit or miss, I think it’s better to focus on other ways to get an upgrade, where you have more control. There are several that work for me. Join me over in this article to find out what they are. See you over there.