Originally Posted by
dark_phoenix
Here is what I would do (note: there is no one right answer and I maintain SAS has a logic to what they do, but they don't share it). Other people will probably have a different experience and that's okay as there is some randomness to all of this and YMMV.
SAS closes out the bidding entirely at T-6. So generally speaking, everything is open until that time. You can keep your bid and monitoring what is happening. SAS won't retract your bid, you'll just likely lose the bid unless something else happens (status impact, business decision by SAS, etc).
What I have sometimes seen is that SAS makes some initial upgrade decisions at around T-24 if your bid is deemed high enough and acceptable to SAS. Anything not allocated at that time goes to Live Bidding / Auction. When there is low inventory in business, I have also seen them go directly to Live Bidding.
Let us know how it turns out. Good luck!
So it went exactly as you had described. In the days leading up to the flight, the number of open seats in Business sat at around 6, and right at 24 hours my previous low bid was not accepted and it went into live bidding. I dropped to the bottom of the list (surprise) and kept on getting outbid, so decided to up my bid to the new minimum ($700) just to see where I would land on the list. I was still way back in the queue - 15 out of 22! The highest bid was a staggering 1500USD, so I knew I didn't have any chance to win the bid for the open seats. It was a packed flight in general and I was wondering why so many people are travelling SFO-CPH in mid-October, but then I realized it was the end of Dreamforce (the huge Salesforce convention in San Francisco) and everybody was returning home. The flight was chock full of consultants and later in CPH when I was waiting in the lounge for my next flight, I overheard a group of the conference attendees talking and one mentioned bidding some insane number of EB points to grab the last open seat. Oh the consultant life...
Hope my return flight isn't as crazy (minimum bid for CPH-LAX is still at 400USD), but it's also not as critical for a day flight.