Just have to share this here because of how unbelievably tone-deaf it is.
I have an upcoming flight with Lufthansa, booked cheapest economy class. Now I get a mail that says I am eligible for an upgrade.
Correction, I am eligible to make an offer to maybe maybe get an upgrade. When I click that link I get to the page above in the screenshot where I can now choose an amount between 90 and 300-ish EUR per passenger, per flight, to maybe upgrade to business class.
Just look at the slider, it is almost hilarious that it says poor when you leave it at the low amounts. Is any other airline doing that?
It reminds me of gambling and i don’t like it.
Seeing how similar this interface looks in all the examples makes me think this is not something the airlines did come up with themselves, but rather might be a something offered by a third party that they implement in their booking process.
I.e. not only milking the customer as much as possible by having them bid instead of fixed price upgrades, but maybe even having a third party taking a fee or commission, which will ultimately be passed on to the customer through higher prices.
This is just speculation though. Does anyone have insight into this?
I don’t have any insights but I agree that if there are similar things offered across airlines, even with similar interfaces, then some startup somewhere is probably selling this “key-in-hand” solution, they probably have a sick PowerPoint deck!
Seems like a company rolling out a shit idea on April Fools day to have the ability to say it was a joke the next day when backlash inevitably happens.
Expect to see this a lot more the next few years, as companies become even further soulless husks of themselves with decisions being made by AI.
No April Fools, the mail is a couple days old.
And you even pay for the chance so i guess no refund if you were unlucky? ( I hope its a april fools joke, but in such times it is realistic )
If you don’t succeed then you presumably won’t pay.
I still hate it though. The “colour coding” of the offer dial too, encouraging you to make an overpriced offer in the “green” range.
Get fucked. I hate this blind bidding nonsense. Offer me a price upfront, and I’ll tell you if I want it or not.
Is this… An airline loot box?
No, I am pretty sure it says somewhere if you don’t “win” the bid you don’t pay. Also not an e-mail from today but couple days ago.
It states “Review and Pay” so i think you pay for it.
It is very simple to assume they place a hold on your card immediately, and they map this to the consumer idea of payment. The transaction would then remain unconfirmed until they decide your bid wins. If you lose, the hold vanishes.
They place a hold that goes away if your offer is not accepted or you cancel your bid, which you can do anytime before it’s accepted (usually in the 24 hours before the flight).
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I think it means the chances are poor, but if this is real (April 1st), they could have used more sensible wording like “Peasant” or “Self-Loading Cargo”
Nono, you don’t understand, it’s not calling you poor. It’s calling your offer poor, yeah, that’s… eh… much… better…
“oh we don’t make enough money if we just tell you how much it costs, we need you to overpay”
Hey it’s just like Amtrak’s PoorBid system of selling business/first class seats (the real name is BidUp).
If you feel like it you can just put the minimum bid and see what happens. If it’s off peak and mid week chances are pretty good.
It’s a 1 hour and a half flight. The cheapest offer I can select is 1/3 of my current ticket. I just don’t see how that’s worth it at all.
It’s worth it if you would hate your current experience I suppose.
But yeah, not worth it at all, in my opinion. If I hated a budget option so badly that paying premium would win out, I’d have done that in the first place.
I have made bids on short flights if the free luggage included in business class would make the bid cost less than paying for the bags. I haven’t been successful yet, however…
Those cowards should allow for bids starting from one euro when they do that bullshit.
Is it an April Fools?
Nope.
Had similar experience with air Portugal, I didn’t even bother to click.
I’ve seen this same email and UI from WestJet when I booked a flight over Christmas. Was incredibly insulted by it as well, especially by the Subject line making it sound like they’re just upgrading you if you open the email.
This isn’t really that uncommon, some airlines do similar (American I believe gave me this option on my last flight) and a lot of hotels and cruise lines do it. You are essentially bidding on available upgrades. The email wording is pretty tone deaf and the labels on that graphic are not the best (it’s trying to show if your bid has a high chance of winning an upgrade or not) but on the whole it’s a decent system to fill unused upgraded seats/rooms and in theory opens up lower seats for folks to use that otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford them.
This wasn’t a thing when I used to travel a lot for work before the pandemic. Getting people to bid on seats is a ridiculous attempt to wring as much money out of people as possible, nothing more.
Another extraction scheme
It definitely was a thing but very airline dependent. It’s a great way to get a business class seat for cheap.
I won a bid for business on Swiss in December 2019, a couple of months before Covid.
It’s likely not coincidental that this came post-pandemic - with virtual meetings largely replacing business travel, the business class seats no longer reliably get filled. These seats also paid for basically the whole flight, so airlines are looking to monetize them through alternative means.
I’m honestly not really against this, it doesn’t really matter that much.
Something tells me their rating of “poor” isn’t based on actual demand
I know someone who recently flew with Philippine Airlines that got an email exactly like this, after booking the cheapest possible economy seats. It’s a Wild West bidding war against other passengers for maybe a “premium economy” upgrade that gets you three economy seats in a row for yourself, so you can lay down and sleep on all of them during the long flight. It’s telling of an airline when this flight booked almost a year in advance wasn’t ever going to be a full flight.
That being said, if you’re ever flying to the Philippines, take any other Asian airline but PAL. They’re stingy with drinks, they have strict overhead carry-on weight limits that forces you to check bags in for a fee, their food is school/prison cafeteria quality, they delay flights without taking responsibility for screwing up your connecting flights, and you’re overall treated like cattle when in economy.
I had this on an SAS flight almost a decade ago. It worked out well because the earlier you sign up the bettter your chance. I got upgraded to transatlantic Business class for only $300 per person.
