How to "win" business class ticket at auction with ITA Airways
There are many ways to travel business class, obviously the one we prefer here at TFC is to travel without paying [...]
ITA Airways
SkyTeam
There are many ways to travel business class, of course what we prefer here at TFC is to travel without paying a ticket But using points from loyalty programs. We have done this so many times and We have told this often on our website.
In this article:
Discarding the Urban legends of free upgrades given to travelers dressed up or with flashy outfits, which indeed sometimes cause the opposite effect with the risk of not being put on planes, remain the paid options.
Among the paid options is the auction of unsold seats. I had already told about my experience with Alitalia and now ITA Airways also offers the same option again through the Plusgrade platform.
How Plusgrade works for ITA Airways
Did you get your flight cancelled, miss your connection, land late?
You could get up to 600€ compensation per person
A few days before your flight, usually a dozen or so, you receive an email from the airline suggesting that you request an upgrade for one or more of the routes you plan to fly and for which there is still space available in the upper class.
Upon entering the system, you will see the routes where you can bid. The rules are simple:
- Make your bid to request an upgrade for one or more legs of your trip, then click on the "Continue" button;
- you can change or cancel your offer until it is accepted;
- bids will be selected between 72 and 24 hours before flight departure;
- receive e-mail Whether your upgrade request will be accepted;
- in case of upgrade you will be charged the amount of your offer, otherwise you will pay nothing and your original ticket will remain valid;
- once accepted, your offer is no longer refundable;
- the offer is for each passenger on the same reservation (PNR);
- the amount offered for the upgrade is an additional charge to be added to the original ticket purchased.
In this case, the system only offers me the option to upgrade for the return flight, not because the outbound flight is full, but Simply because I will already be traveling business class. For the flight from the Argentine capital to Rome, the minimum bid is 610€, the maximum bid is 910€. A small indicator on the right indicates how "valid" the offer you are entering is.
Be careful, it's not like on Ebay, you can't see how many empty seats there are (we recommend checking via Expert Flyer) or even how many bids and/or how much has been offered by other participants. So there is no possibility of bidding, only raising one's bid blindly.
Does it make sense to try your luck?
A business class seat on Singapore Airlines' A350
It all depends on how much you are willing to spend in addition to what you have already spent. Generally speaking, the price of the offer, added to the price of the paid ticket, should not exceed the starting price of the flight, also because the upgrade in this case does not allow you to earn additional Volare points.
The other assessments to be made are the cabin layout and the duration of the flight. In this case it is almost 14 hours aboard an airplane, having legroom, a seat that becomes a bed, quality catering might be worth the cost of the upgrade. For example, I was happy to pay just over €1,000 for an upgrade in La Premiere, Air France's first class.
It certainly doesn't make any sense to have the upgrade auction on domestic flights, superior class is nothing more than a front row with an empty seat in between, for a maximum 90-minute flight.
NB. There is an obvious error in the plusgrade platform., on Rome-Genoa two possible upgrades are proposed, one in business and one in superior, when however they are the same thing. The nice thing is that they are offered at two different prices.
