What do you mean by "buy it outright"? AFAIK, you can only bid for an upgrade, or is there another way to just pay a flat fee to secure a business seat if you already bought an economy ticket?

"Buy it outright" means to pay the current commerical market price for the seat using whatever method you used to book your original ticket. For clarity and to avoid any more misunderstanding, that means paying the fare difference between the ticket you currently have and the business class ticket you want. It's the nuclear option, but as somone whose back occasionally causes them trouble, there are times where I just upgrade by buying the business class fare. Otherwise, my standard range for upgrade bids is between €60-100 per hour of flight time, depending on the popularity of the flight.

Hope that clarified.

Exactly, I am not too worried. I'll monitor the price and then decide closer to date what to do with my bid (increase or cancel).

My LAX to CPH flight is on Thursday and about a week ago the minimum bid jumped to $1120 and has remained there. Not looking too good for me!

that’s wild. Everyone’s has jumped this high. This is a new one to me. Haven’t seen it before. Can you come back and let us know what happens and also if they offer it for less at the airport. At this point it’s the same as buying it outright if you consider your original fare

Yes I’ll let you know how it goes.

My flight is also on Thursday and just jumped to 1600... At this point, I mentally gave up on an upgrade. 5 seats are taken, the rest still show as free.
I opened an Expert Flyer account just as curiosity. The flight shows the same reserved seat number as trying to book a flight through SAS, with the difference that all other "free" business seats are "Premium + Paid", which I don't really understand what it means, but they don't seem to be technically taken, as they would show on a different category if they were.

I wonder if this increased min bid has anything to do with the transition from EB to the Air France/KLM program. Strange these minimum
bids are now basically the same cost as buying outright when adding original ticket expenditure. I can’t see it being a very lucrative proposition for the airline. Then again, maybe they are trying to force more to buy business outright. Not enough value in their product for that in my opinion.

My flight leaves in around 24 hours. The minimum bid this morning was still 1600 Eur. I just received an email about my 600 Eur bid being accepted. I am ecstatic! Still confused on why the bid was so high and mine was accepted though

Yours might have been (amongst) the highest bid(s) received at the moment bidding closed. Just because the current "minimum" accepted online is EUR 1600 doesn't mean that SAS will get lucky and persuade anyone to pay that. I suspect that advertised bidding minimums are not a reflection of bids received so far but rather an aspiration from the operator to try and drive higher revenues.

thank you for coming back and letting us know. Safe travels and enjoy.

Points upgrade question
 

I have a revenue SAS plus flight coming up and I bid 29000 using points right after booking. Now the flight is 3 weeks away and the minimum bid is 31000 points.

On this route I usually win (ARN-EWR) and I don’t care about saving 2000 points, should I update my bid based on this message?

https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/www.fly...f03ee93f3.jpeg

I wouldnt do it based on what I have read as experience from other travellers. I think they just try to lure you in / milk you.

My $500 bid for business class was declined and I was unable to purchase an upgrade at the gate. I’m not surprised because this flight seems full.

Just my humble opinion…
without outright buying the class you want to travel in you can just never know what will happen on any given day. A lot of people are traveling right now & if as you say, you don’t care about 2000 pts, then I would think worth the bid because if you don’t get it & cannot upgrade at airport… then what…are you ok with it…only you can decide if it’s worth that risk!