Anyone had any positive experience with the relatively new Swiss Upgrade Bargain offer?
The idea is that if you book economy you can submit a bid for business upgrade. Supposed to be a bargain - but not in my limited experience.
I'm off to São Paulo later this month and paid about 1200 CHF economy. In the meantime, seats on the same flights in business are 2000 in total. Would have been totally worth it.
I got an email inviting me to bid for an upgrade - there's a little barometer telling me how strong my bid is. The weakest of the weak is 890 CHF each way; the strongest a little over 3000. A rip off.
I'm failing to see where the bargain is here.
(oh and yeah, my return leg went down from 780 to 365...)
I'd assume that whether or not you end up with a bargain might be down to the route.
I fly ZRH-ORD, where Swiss is the only direct flight. Business class is priced knowing that most travelers don't have many other options. IIRC the least expensive roundtrip business class ticket I've had in the last couple years was 2800, usual price is 4-5000 off peak, 6000-plus during holidays.
So bidding for an upgrade might be a decent deal on that route.
On the other hand, upgradable economy tickets on that route are not exactly inexpensive either.
I've not done it, though, because I usually don't have the luxury of being able to plan very far in advance. Besides, I don't like uncertainty. There's enough of that in travel today as it is.
I don't have experience with this Swiss upgrade feature but the idea behind it is to have the highest revenue as possible per flight. If their business class has a lot of empty seats, it's better to have someone from the economy paying a bit extra for it than having no more incoming cash.
Just bid what you think it's worth for it and see what happens.
How did you find Business class tickets for Fr.2000? I have never seen it for less than Fr.4000.
Unless you are looking at Iberia or TAP... but with Swiss, I have never seen that price. You have to give me some tips... I always end up flying economy to Brazil (for work) because the price difference between business and economy is too big, and I 'd rather spend my travel budget on Singapore airlines business instead, for example.
Air Berlin offer you the option of bidding to be guaranteed the seat next to yours remains empty. Typically they offer that option some days before the flight when they see a given flight is not going to fill up anyway. It happened to me twice and both times I declined to make a bid but ended up sitting next to an empty seat anyway.
Google Flights is your friend, by far the best way to search. LX currently have a sale on to certain destinations. LH with a change in FRA often goes very cheaply to South America too. Only thing to beware is taht often these tickets have a 6+ night minimum stay, so not sure if that works for you.
See here for example. If you click on the dates, the cheapest fares appear in green. There seems to be wide availability ZRH to GRU well into March next year for CHF 2k.
Don't even need to look at Google - it's from the Swiss site itself.
My dates are 14-26 July. As of 2h ago they were still 2k business (nice round 1000 each way)
I of course see what Swiss is trying to do here, several other airlines are doing it too, but setting the minimum bid so high seems counter productive. I'd happily bid 400 or so, but not something that's in spitting distance of the going rate - merely to "have a chance" of an upgrade.
axman said he could rarely find cheap flights to Brazil - Google Flights is still a much more flexible search tool for finding cheap flights across various airlines and dates. You can't book through Google but it does give you the direct link to book on either Swiss or an OTA.
Agreed - the upgrade bids are rarely recalibrated to match the latest sales fares, unfortunately...
I'm not sure what Swiss's policy is, but you could call them and ask if you can apply the economy fare already paid towards a new business-class ticket. I know that this used to work on United; I tried the same on BA but they insisted that all refund penalties applied.
Fare sales are funny things -- I recently bought a US-EU flight on Air France during a fare sale. Business, and yes, even First, were cheaper than Premium Economy (which wasn't on sale). So I had the choice of $1800 in Business, $2100 in First, or $2400 in Premium Economy.
And yes, whoever said Google Flights was your friend, was right. It's a great tool.
It worked for me a couple of years ago. Wife suddenly had a bad back, and I called them to ask if we could cancel our vacation, they said sorry, cheap ticket so no refund. Then they said, why don't you upgrade her to business class and we only had to pay the difference. Lucky her. But we all got to go on vacation.
Yeah we saw the same thing when we went to Zanzibar in April. The offer was to bid on the return flight from Dar es Salaam, but the lowest bid available was around 500chf each, and we'd only paid around 350 each for the return trip in the first place.
They totally make it sound like you can offer stupidly low bid and you might get lucky, but it doesn't seem to work like that in practice.
A couple months ago I flew Swiss ZH to JFK, paid 650.00 return economy (inc paying 50 extra each way to choose premium seats). I got an email telling me about the Business class upgrade bidding offer and looked at it. I can't remember what the normal business price was when I booked but the sliding bid went from 800 to about 3000 extra each way.
Even though I hate flying I didn't bid. But upon boarding at ZH they upgraded me anyway for free. The experience taught me that, for long haul at least, paying extra for business really is worth it.
But yeah, to agree with the OP, I don't see these bids as being a very special price
We have an 11 hour flight this week. I bought very well priced economy tickets back in March directly on Swiss and placed a minimum bid on the business upgrade at the time of booking.
I got an email today informing me I had lucked out ...and shortly before that (like 3 hours before)... a call from Swiss saying that the "robot" had eliminated all the low bids and therefore upgrade seats were still available..(even though I'd get the email..etc) and that I could get them now for less than my initial bid...which I agreed to.
Long story short - vacation starts very nicely with an 11 hour flight in biz class for the price of what economy tickets are going for now.
will try it again, but my kids better not get used to it....
2/2 - ...2 days before returning, received an email we had been upgraded to business - nice way to end the vacation.
All-in, our 5 tickets (priced as economy + 2 upgrade auctions) for r/t business came in at about 55% of the cost of 5 business class tickets.
The fact that we bid on 5 tickets probably helped tilt it our way though as I assume the computer figures best to have 5x low bid VS. 1 or 2 seats with high bids..or maybe just lucky. Either way, a nice trip and we'll try it again on future long-haul flights.
What i did was placing a bid just slightly above the minimum. I thought that others would do the minimum bid and that way I would get it. It worked for me and I got the ticket.
My flight back from São Paulo had about eight or nine people in the business cabin. The economy cabin had quite a few seats free.
I'd have given them 200-300 for one of those empty spots, but not 890. Minimum bids for this case (every flight is different) were IMHO simply set too high to be attractive.