How much will you pay for an upgrade?

Customers travelling with Norwegian Cruise Line will have a rather inventive way offered to them to upgrade their cabin.

NCL have revealed their brand new offer to customers called the ‘Upgrade Advantage Program’ which will be offered on all of their ships by March this year.

The new initiative gives guests the opportunity to submit a ‘bid’ of what they are willing to pay for an upgrade to the next category (i,e Balcony to Mini Suite.) The scheme was tested on a handful of NCL’s ships in 2016 and feedback was excellent. Customers will receive email contact directly from NCL where they have to opportunity to bid for an upgrade. There is no contact required with your agent, it’s purely a case of bid and wait. If your bid is successful, you could be enjoying a very good value upgrade.

I think the scheme solves a number of issues faced by cruise lines and the idea is not new or ground breaking, as airlines such as KLM and hotels use similar bidding style processes to sell their most prized seats/rooms. NCL are however, the first cruise line to offer the scheme and I think it will really help them maximize their best rooms as well as making customers very happy.

Quite often I get asked a few weeks prior to sailing how much an upgrade is, It is never a good deal, in fact almost always the same price it was a time of the original booking. My advice has been to ask once onboard, this advice will now not be the best.

Any upgrade bids are on a guarantee basis meaning the cruise line would be allocating the cabin. It is also the same with category, so if you were bidding on a Mini Suite, you would not be bidding on a specific grade of Mini Suite, you could get any.

In principle this sounds good and I am sure everyone that is successful will only speak highly of it.

I’m looking forward to seeing how this pans out.