Upgrade bidding: the empty cabin your passengers would happily pay for

Forty-five days before sailing, a Royal Caribbean guest gets an email: would you like to bid for a better stateroom? They name a price per person above a published minimum, can change their mind until 48 hours before departure, and if the bid is accepted their card is charged, no refunds, and their original cabin goes straight back on sale. The programme is called RoyalUp. Celebrity calls its version MoveUp, Norwegian has Upgrade Advantage, MSC simply MSC Upgrade, Virgin Voyages Level Upgrade. Princess, Oceania, Regent, Silversea and Cunard run one, and so do Uniworld and AmaWaterways on the rivers. Nearly all of them sit on the same platform, Plusgrade, the company that already runs bid-for-upgrade auctions for airlines.

This isn’t a trick reserved for mega-ships. It answers a problem you know well: a month out, you still have suites and balconies unsold, and passengers in inside cabins who would have liked something better and never said so.

How the machine picks a winner

First myth to drop: the highest bid does not automatically win. Royal Caribbean Blog, which has been dissecting RoyalUp for years, put it plainly in early October: the algorithm chooses the offer expected to generate the most revenue for the line, which is a different thing. It looks at the cabin the guest would vacate. An inside, a standard balcony or a Junior Suite resells quickly, so their occupants have good odds. An oceanview, a very expensive suite or an interior-facing balcony is harder to shift, so those guests have lower odds. And a lot of winning bids land at or barely above the minimum.

Timing differs by line. Celebrity opens within 30 days of departure, Royal Caribbean at 45, Princess at 85 days for voyages under 25 nights and 115 beyond, AmaWaterways around 85 days out on its river ships. The rules are broadly shared: bids are per person but charged for double occupancy; you can raise or cancel until acceptance; once accepted, it’s final. MSC matches the bid automatically for the second guest and upgrades third and fourth occupants free. Norwegian lets an inside-cabin guest bid up to three categories higher, everyone else two.

Amounts range from pocket money to serious cash. Cruise Critic reports a $75-per-person bid accepted for an aft inside to a midship balcony on Norwegian Epic, and a $1,000-per-person minimum to move from a Celebrity Suite to a Royal Suite. The rule of thumb borrowed from airlines: bid 20 to 40% of the gap between the fare you paid and the fare of the cabin you want.

Why it earns more than a plain upsell

Three effects stack up. The obvious one: a cabin that would have sailed empty, or been dumped at a last-minute rate, now carries a premium. The less obvious one: the cabin freed up is an inside or a standard balcony, which is exactly what the last-minute market buys. You sell the top of the ship to your own passengers and the bottom to newcomers. The third is insurance: Royal Caribbean Blog notes that bidding also cushions late cancellations, because a queue of guests ready to pay already stands behind every suite.

And the whole thing is being industrialised. Plusgrade is building an AI-driven dynamic pricing tool to match bids with available cabins, in a $6.4 million project of which Scale AI is funding $2.5 million. The majors no longer treat an upgrade as a favour from the hotel director. It’s a revenue line with its own engineers.

The version at your scale

You have no Plusgrade and no algorithm. You have a booking file, an email tool and one person who knows the deck plan by heart. That’s enough.

Set the window and stick to it. Say 45 days out for the invitation, 7 days out for the decision. Earlier and you cannibalise full-fare sales; later and there’s no time to resell the vacated cabin. Your early bookers paid up front for a specific category: never let them discover an upgrade sold for less than the fare difference they paid.

Prefer a fixed price to an auction. A real auction needs volume to work. With 120 passengers aboard, an email reading “your balcony for €180 per person, ten cabins available, first come first served” does the same job with a rule everyone understands. The supplement is non-refundable, charged on acceptance, and you keep the right to decline.

Choose who gets the offer. The majors’ algorithm sorts by vacated cabin; you can sort by passenger. A couple in an inside cabin on their third sailing with you deserves the offer before a party of eight in connecting cabins that an upgrade would split up. Cruise Critic lists the cases where bidding is a bad idea for the guest: linked bookings, a need for an accessible cabin, a strong preference for a specific location. Spare them the offer rather than the disappointment.

Keep a few for free. A sold upgrade is revenue; a gifted upgrade is loyalty. The two coexist as long as the gift stays rare, unexpected and reserved for passengers who come back. The worst outcome is a repeat guest learning they could have paid for what they were hoping to be given.

The upgraded guest is your best advocate, for ten minutes

Here’s the detail the bidding platforms ignore. The passenger who opens the door to their balcony on embarkation day is living the most euphoric moment of their cruise, and it doesn’t last. In an hour they’ll have found the buffet; in two they’ll have forgotten they nearly slept without a window. Right now, not on the last night, is when they’d gladly tell someone how lucky they got.

Leave a postcard on the bed of every upgraded cabin, with a QR code in the line’s colours. They photograph the view from the balcony, write “we got upgraded, look what we see from the bed”, and a real card lands with their sister or a colleague. That sentence is the most credible advertising you can buy, and it costs you a stamp. The supplement paid for this cabin; the card pays for the next one.

What to measure

The acceptance rate of your upgrade offers, the average revenue per cabin vacated and resold, and the number of cards sent from upgraded cabins, set against the quote requests that follow. Run those three numbers through the ROI calculator. A suite that sails empty earns nothing. The same suite, sold to a passenger who wanted it but never dared ask, earns twice: once in supplement, once in word of mouth.