SAA lets pax bid for business class
 

"SAA has introduced Step-Up, an online bidding system that gives customers the opportunity to upgrade their seat for an upcoming trip from economy to business class, where business class inventory is available. The programme has been launched on selected routes and will be extended to more routes in the near future."

Source

Johan

"SAA Step-Up Upgrade is not eligible for the following bookings: Tickets booked using promotional fares (G,W,L booking classes), redemption tickets, free tickets, tickets already upgraded using miles, and bookings with infants."

Avoid G, W and L booking classes if you want to test out this feature.

Only available on the following destinations so far:
Sao Paulo, Perth, Entebbe, Lusaka and Cape Town.

Miles will be earned for the original fare booked. So all in all, not THAT interesting except maybe for the long-haul flights.

Excellent that it's only restricted against those 3 fare classes, I expected they'd exclude a much wider range of lower priced fares. I think the fares I typically see from HKG are Q and S, hope to see them add HKG to the list soon.

Three flights on itinerary:

SA 204 JFK - JNB Class L: Eligible for upgrade
SA 327 JNB - CPT Class B: Eligible for upgrade
SA 203 JNB - JFK Class G: Not eligible for upgrade

When I made the reservation, it seemed that all the flights were in the same class since they were the lowest price economy fare and were non-refundable. I was first thinking that SA 203 was not eligible because it was a couple of weeks later, but after reading this thread, I imagine it is because it is in class G. Yet, L is eligible. Go figure.

G is pretty much the cheapest SAA fare class, B is often used on domestic flights on SAA for international connections. L is higher than G on SAA.

I believe the exact hierarchy is as follows (highest to lowest):

Y, B, M, K, H, S, Q, T, V, L, W, G

Anyone been successful yet and at what bid?

Our G class seats on SA 203 JNB - JFK on 3 Sept 2015 have just become eligible for a bid to upgrade to business. While we have bids in for SA 204 and 327, we felt that on an all night flight on SA 203, business may not be worth the additional minimum bid of $1620 USD per person. We have bulkhead seats 62 H&K in economy and would probably fall asleep anyway from shear exhaustion.

I received the upgrade email for LHR-JNB-BLZ. Upgrades are available for 3 out of the 4 legs of which 1 leg is in L class and one in G class and to make it even more interesting there is an infant on the booking. I did get curious to see what the lowest possible bid is but soon got scared off when I saw LHR-JNB was £915 + 71 APD, BLZ-JNB was £365 and JNB-LHR was £915.

data points
 

2 more data points:

MUC-JNB, offer range from GBP 470-680 per pax
JNB-LHR, offer range from GBP 675-1040 (!) per pax.

outbound is in K, inbound in T - not sure if the prices are booking class or route dependent, but either way ... too rich for my blood.

JNB-IAD-JNB, both legs booked in K class and used miles to upgrade, but when I checked the recommended bid was ZAR 15,000 each way!

The minimum offer on my recent LHR-JNB was £740. I did not make an offer. Fare was K.

It does seem like they are pitching this very high! :eek:

Obviously I have no idea what the take up rate is, but I have difficulty believing that this initiative is raising much revenue for SA.

It's an interesting experiment and getting them some publicity. They certainly don't want to cannibalize their genuine business class revenue, what they are probably trying to do is to monetize people who might have been using miles to upgrade.

I probably don't understand that last statement. Why would someone who would prefer to use miles to upgrade choose to pay $$$$ instead? :confused: