In an effort to extract more money out of passengers, fill seats, and grab the attention of the odd bargain hunter, Air Berlin is to offer paid upgrades up to 72 hours to departure via a bidding process.
Air Berlin Airbus A3380 at Chicago O’Hare – Image GhettoIFE
The offering called “airberlin Exquisite” is available for you to test out at airberlin.com/upgrade.
airberlin exquisite landing page – airberlin.com/upgrade.
From there site, you can bid for what you think a business class upgrade is worth, and hope for the best. Successful bidders will have their new assignments (and cards charged) 12 hours before departure. Unsuccessful bids will continue to hold their seats in economy class and their credit cards not charged.
And this is a best bid wins system on a sealed envelope basis, with Topbonus status, booking class and frequency of winning bids.
Tickets coded in Classes A, X and R are not allowed to particpate in the bidding war.
Those of you collecting miles might shy away from this, as this only earns economy miles in Air Berlin’s TopBonus (and whatever that earns in Eithad Guest or oneWorld programmes). Similarly, miles cannot be used in this variant of the upgrade programme, and you have to go through the normal method of requesting upgrades.
Full Terms and conditions are at http://www.airberlin.com/site/affiliate/landingpages/business_class/new_bc/PlusgradeAGBs_EN.pdf if you’re considering this.
For those looking for a bargain upgrade, this could be up your street… depending on how much they try and sell the upgrades for, and the normal loads in Business class.
Certainly – it’s a way of the Air Berlin getting extra income on possibly empty seats.
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