I can't speak for the SYD sector. But from reading on here, they don't seem to play "let's make a deal." You can pay the fare difference, otherwise don't really expect an attractive bid price. If you get an offer to bid at all. I'd bet you won't get one for the BOS sector but please report back either way.

For example, we've had some of our staff recently get bidding emails. These are for intra-Asia flights. I saw a few of them, it was head scratching: for example HKG-Changsha, HKG-Taipei and Shanghai-HKG were the three. In each case, they were better off just paying for the J class ticket fare difference than the "recommended bid". I guess they could've lowballed Cathay and maybe had success, I'm not sure. But it was all still a very bad deal, even at the lowest accepted bid. Not that we would've paid for them to fly in J anyway but they were distributed around the office, someone was trying to make a point that CX is badly run. I don't think any of them paid out of their own pockets for the upgrade, even HKG-TPE the lowest bid allowed was over $100 USD for one-way. This is not good value.

I've never used the system but from what I can tell on here, it's a failed experiment.