Cruise upgrade bidding

Fleet Captain James

Apr 15

7 min read

Updated: 7 hours ago

What the cruise lines won’t tell you

Who is really behind that upgrade email
The three things that decide who gets upgraded
Where loyalty fits, and where it doesn’t
How to work out what to bid, and when not to bid at all
The catches nobody mentions in the email

There is much written these days, especially by latter-day influencers, about supposedly 'proven techniques' to bag an upgrade. Of course, it's all done to drive clicks. Regardless of whether they are giving advice about upgrades on aircraft or cruise ships, the common thread of all such posts is the idea that if you are pleasant enough to the right person, mention it is your anniversary, or that your loyalty to their brand can tip the odds and score you a better seat or cabin.

After decades working on the front lines in both the aviation and cruise industries, I can categorically say that every single one of these ‘experts’ has no idea how upgrades are awarded, and their tips are as worthless as their compelling need for attention.

The evidence is clear. The upgrade fairy is dead. She was replaced by an algorithm. An algorithm that doesn’t give two hoots about how nice you might be, how loyal you are to the cruise line or in most cases how often you sail.

Here is what actually happens now, and how to work it.

Meet the robot, and the robot master deciding if you get upgraded

Almost without exception, upgrade programs in the cruise industry are managed by an external company.

The vast majority have handed the job to a Montreal company called Plusgrade. Like me, you’ve probably never heard the name.

My guess is that you also have no idea that Plusgrade is the brains and brawn behind the world’s biggest airline frequent‑flyer upgrade programs: United, American, British Airways, Emirates, and even the most successful and profitable of them all—Qantas.

Same platform, same logic, a different logo on the email. Plusgrade is the robot. The cruise line is the robot master: it sets the rules, and the software does the sorting.

That’s why, when you call a cruise line to ask about an upgrade, you’re often told: “We can’t assist—please follow the instructions in the email.” They’re not being evasive. They truly don’t control it.

I find it really quite remarkable how one company has become so entrenched in this space, across so many different industries, and how this happened without us, the end users, being any the wiser. Usually when a company has achieved such heights of penetration and dominance, you’d expect more than a few rounds of triumphant self promotion.

But not Plusgrade. It’s in their interest, and in the interests of the industries they serve, that they operate in the shadows. There’s nothing nefarious in any of this. It’s mainly because the companies you love and trust have a vested interest in maintaining that love and trust. It’s not in the interests of either to shatter the upgrade fairy myth.

How Plusgrade conquered the world while you were sleeping

They describe themselves plainly on their website —and they’re not shy about their focus: “We are the global ancillary revenue powerhouse.”

Translation? Revenue first. Everything else is secondary.

If you want to win that upgrade, understand this above all else, these are the rules of the game ... Your bid, indeed all bids, are nothing more than ancillary revenue and they are judged, (and awarded), primarily by revenue first.

Which brings us back to that email. It reads like a personal invitation, but it is an automated trigger. It goes out on a schedule, to everyone eligible, whether or not there are actually any vacant higher category cabins available. Nobody looked at your booking and decided you had earned something.

It also explains how and why the old surprise and delight upgrade became extinct. A cabin given away free earns nothing.

The same cabin put out to bid earns something from almost everybody who wants it. No revenue manager is handing that back.

What actually decides it

Three things, in this order.

The money. Total bid value for the cabin is the main sort. Two couples want the one suite, one has bid $1,200 a head and the other $800. You already know how that ends.
Empty cabins. No unsold cabins in the category above, no upgrades, whatever anyone bid. A full ship means no one moves up.
Loyalty. A tiebreaker between two similar bids. That is the whole of it.

What frequent flyers get wrong. Cruise upgrades aren’t airline upgrades with a nautical accent—they’re structurally different systems. Frequent flyer points have a cash value the airline itself publishes. Cruise loyalty tiers buy you a bag of laundry and an invitation to a cocktail party.

Loyalty is nice. Cash is better.

Working out your number

First, throw away the brochure fare. This confuses people no end.

You are not bidding against the published price of the better cabin. You are bidding against what other passengers have offered for it. The number on the website tells you nothing about what will win.

This might come as a shock to many but the brochure price is completely and utterly irrelevant. The algorithm couldn’t care less what the cabin sells for. It only cares what everyone else has put on the table.

Then three steps.

Decide what it is worth to you, not what it costs.

Not what a suite is worth in the abstract, but what you would hand over today to move out of your cabin and into that one. Write the number down before you open the bidding page, because that page is built to walk you upward.

Read the ship, count the cabins

Few cabins left in the category you want means there will be more people bidding, so bid closer to your number. A voyage with loads of unsold cabins means there will be less bidders so you can afford to bid low.

If you want to know how many cabins are actually left in a category, or across the whole ship, that is what my new cabin counter is for. This will be live on our website soon.

Ignore the slider.

The bid bar that runs from Poor to Excellent and climbs as you drag is not calibrated to anything, except your heart strings. It is not telling you your odds. It is telling you to spend more. Put your number in and leave it alone.

Avoid both ends while you are at it. The minimum exists to make bidding look cheap and it almost never wins. The maximum exists for people who want to find out what their ceiling feels like.

Mistakes that hurt

You give up the cabin you chose. This is the one people continually get wrong. You picked 7042 because it is midships, away from the lift, with nothing noisy above it. Win the upgrade and you are handed whatever happens to be free in the new category. That might be right forward, under the pool deck, or beside the crew stairs. A better category in a worse position is not a better cruise.

Big danger when you bid for an upgrade. The Plusgrade algorithm will generally work this way: it unseats everyone who has bid, and then goes back and allocates cabins to maximise revenue. If we move X, Y and Z we get $1,000, or if we move X, Y and K we get $1,500, so it is X, Y and K that win. But by doing so, K may have been moved into your cabin. Although you didn’t win an upgrade, and you will stay within the category you booked, if you booked a specific midships cabin on the port side you may be moved to one under a galley. Once you add your credit card there is no going back.

An upgrade is not always an upgrade. An obstructed balcony can be a worse cabin than a good oceanview. Categories are split for revenue reasons, not passenger ones, and two cabins with the same layout can sit in different categories for reasons you would never guess from the brochure. Look at the deck plan for the exact category before you bid a cent.

The position and demarcation between categories on deck plans is very arbitrary. For example, a line might have four categories of entry level balconies, all the same size and same appointments, the only difference being a jump in price between each as you move from forward or aft to more midships and upwards to higher decks. For example V1 $1,000, V2 $2,000, V3 $3,000, V4 $4,000. The problem is, if you don’t know the deck plan and where categories start and end, that demarcation line, you could bid hundreds of dollars, potentially thousands of dollars, just to move next door.

The money goes the moment you win. The bid is charged automatically and it is not refundable. There is no changing your mind at the gangway. Cruise lines will not reverse an upgrade. It is in the terms and conditions that you accept when you add your credit card.

Sold out ships still send the emails. The trigger is a date, not an inventory check. An invitation to bid is not evidence that anything is there to be won.

And if you are in connecting cabins with family, or you need an accessible cabin, do not bid at all. What you stand to lose is worth more than the upgrade.

Now tell me what you bid

Here is the problem with upgrade advice, mine included. Everybody has one story. One bid tells you nothing. A few hundred bids tell you what actually wins.

So I am collecting them. Five questions, about twenty seconds, and you can do it whether you won or lost.

Which cruise line
Which category you were in, and which one you bid for
What you bid, per person, per night
Won or lost
Your email, only if you want to be told when the numbers move

No name, no ship, no sailing date. I do not need them and asking for them would only slow you down.

Everything that comes in goes onto this page, anonymously, as it arrives. So you can see where your number would have sat before you place it. That is the whole point. Not forum hearsay, not what somebody’s brother in law reckons he got away with. The actual spread.

Got a bid in front of you and not sure what to offer? Ask in our Facebook group. Someone there has almost certainly sailed that line recently and been in exactly the same spot, and I would rather you hear it from them than guess.

6 Star 4 Less Facebook Group

For those who are new here, I’m Fleet Captain James, and my business, 6 Star 4 Less, has a laser focus, more than any other agency, on ensuring we get you the lowest price on six‑star ships.

More than any other agency, we really can help you predict—with a high degree of accuracy—whether a cruise you want to book will go up or down in price.