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?
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.