As reasonably widely reported (here for example), Virgin Australia has finally introduced the ability to waitlist for upgrades. This is in addition to the ability to confirm an upgrade if business award space is available, or to bid for an upgrade with cash, which on the face of it would seem to indicate that anyone wanting to upgrade has plenty of options available.

However, attempting to upgrade a recent trip to New Zealand was a somewhat frustrating and puzzling experience, which made me wonder what Virgin's thinking behind the new system is - or whether it's just a case of poor systems hampering VA's ability to provide a more user-friendly upgrade system.

I was flying with my partner SYD-CHC on the last flight of the day last Friday. As we needed a few extra status credits to sneak us over the line to gold (thanks to family pooling), one of us was flying on a flexi fare, while the other was booked on a smart saver fare on the NZ codeshare (which was usefully cheaper than booking via VA directly, and allowed the purchase of the works package without needing to pay for a flexi fare).

Since it requires so few points to upgrade from flexi to business, I figured it made sense to give it a shot, as neither of us have experienced VA's narrowbody biz product, and at the end of a long week some decent wine and food would have been welcome. No biz award seats were available on that flight so that request was waitlisted. Meanwhile, by entering the VA record locator for the NZ codeshare booking on VA's site, I was given the opportunity to enter an 'Upgrade Me' bid, which I did (for $205, which is $5 more than the minimum bid, and honestly is pretty poor value but it was out of curiosity more than anything else).

I had assumed the cash bid would have a greater chance of success than the points bid, but to my surprise neither upgrade was successful despite the business cabin having plenty of space - in fact it remained entirely empty. At around 25 hours prior to flight time I received an email informing me that the cash upgrade bid was unsuccessful, while the points upgrade request just vanished off the system (having previously shown as 'waitlisted'). However I was still able to request a points upgrade online, so I tried again. At the airport, they could see no record of us having entered an upgrade request, despite a lengthy chat to the (very friendly and helpful) customer service desk.

It was no great tragedy to miss out on the upgrades for this flight - for the short hop to New Zealand, VA's product in economy is uninspiring but entirely adequate (though this was an exceptionally long flight, thanks to a two hour tarmac delay and a fuel-gauge fault that necessitated an unusually circuitous routing which involved flying northeast from Sydney to overfly Lord Howe Island before turning southeast to CHC). But it did leave me wondering what Virgin is trying to achieve with what appears to be a very clumsy system.

Despite the so-called waitlist feature (which won't automatically clear your upgrade when confirmable seats become available anyway), will upgrades only clear if award space is made available? Since VA doesn't seem to be in the habit of releasing much last-minute award space, does that mean they have decided they would rather let the seats go empty than secure a bit of last-minute revenue for otherwise unsold seats? If so, why bother introducing the various upgrade options?

There were two things that might have made this unusual:

• first, because literally nobody had booked into biz class, perhaps opening up the cabin for the sake of the marginal upgrade revenue is not in fact worth it (especially since Y was also far from full, so freeing up more seats in economy offered no additional benefit to VA);
• second, since the flight was close to Christmas, it seemed that perhaps VA was not releasing any biz award availability on the SYD-CHC nonstop route from about December 4th onwards, so this may have affected how the system worked.

Either way, it seems like a very clumsy implementation. Or am I missing something? I'd be interested to hear others' thoughts on this.