An experienced traveler has shared why he changed his strategy for cruise cabin upgrades after discovering that the winning bid is not always the highest one, prompting plenty of reaction from others.
Booking a room on a cruise ship usually means choosing from the standard options available at the time of purchase.
That might mean picking a cabin with a window, selecting an interior room close to key areas of the ship, or paying more for a premium suite.
Some passengers, however, prefer to reserve a basic cabin first and then wait for the chance to bid for an upgrade later.
Gary Bembridge decided to look deeper into that process after finding out he had missed out on an upgrade to someone who had offered less money.
Known on YouTube as Tips For Travellers, Bembridge regularly shares advice and insights for people planning trips around the globe.
Even with plenty of travel knowledge, he said the cruise upgrade system caught him off guard while preparing for another voyage.
” If you’ve ever been invited to bid for a cruise cabin upgrade, you probably assumed (like me) that the highest bid wins. But, that’s not how it works at all. After losing an upgrade to another passenger who had bid less than I did, I decided to investigate what was really going on behind cruise line upgrade bidding. What I found completely changed how I approach the process.”
His research led him to a detail that had apparently been there the whole time.
After reviewing bid invitation emails from 11 different cruise operators, he noticed that each booking page said it was powered by Plusgrade.
“This means the cruise lines are not managing cabin upgrades themselves, but are using a third-party company, Plusgrade, instead,” said Bembridge.
Plusgrade describes its cruise product as a white-label upgrade system used by a number of major cruise brands, and says its platform uses inventory controls and decisioning tools to help cruise lines select which guests to upgrade. In other words, the offer a passenger sees is part of a broader revenue-management process, not a simple highest-bid auction. Plusgrade also says upgrade programs can be tailored by sailing and cabin inventory, which helps explain why two people can bid different amounts and still see different outcomes.
That mattered, he explained, because Plusgrade apparently “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.”
Bembridge said that means the system does not simply award the upgrade to the top offer, even if that would seem, in his words, “counterintuitive.”
Instead, he said the model factors in the value of your current cabin, what other passengers are offering, the cost of the higher-grade room, and where your existing cabin is located, since that may affect how easily it can be sold again if you move.
He also noted that cruise upgrade programs generally do not let passengers choose an exact cabin number or deck location if their bid is successful, so even winning bidders may be assigned any cabin in the selected grade.
“So, the assumption we passengers make that if we bid high, we increase our chance of winning is not true,” he said.
Because of that, he now bases his bids on whether the cruise line is likely to benefit from moving him out of his current room, rather than just trying to outbid everyone else.
For many cruise lines, upgrade bidding has become a standard part of the pre-sailing process, with some brands publicly describing it as a way for guests to bid on higher stateroom categories after booking. In many cases, the terms also make clear that an accepted upgrade is subject to availability and that the original booking conditions may still apply unless specifically changed by the cruise line.
Viewers had plenty to say after hearing his findings.
“As someone who only travels in solo cabins I never bother bidding as I’ve always just assumed the system is stacked against me,” one commenter wrote under his investigation, adding: “Thanks for confirming my hunch. Great video as always.”
Another wrote: “Ok, now this makes more sense! We always get those emails to bid for an upgrade but usually the amount it lets you bid is far more than we’re comfortable with – because that amount IS doubled!! Thanks Gary!!”
Plusgrade was contacted for comment.