Plusgrade upgrade vs status benefits
 

Just got an email regarding my vx 22 / vx29 sfo-jfk itinerary starting tomorrow from virgin america. Apparently they are partnering with http://plusgrade.com to enable bidding for main cabin select seats.

I have elevate silver status. The one perk that really feels valuable is free upgrades to main cabin select / exit row seats 12 hours before the flight (24 hrs for gold members) based on availability.

Does this plusgrade partnership mark the end of my favorite status benefit? If so, my loyalty to the elevate program will drop significantly. What are your thoughts and experiences with it?

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Here's the email I got 2 hours ago:

Here's what the plusgrade site looks like: http://i.imgur.com/tlPoUY4.jpg

The few times I've seen this, the upgrades have seemed rather overpriced -- costing way more than the ones available at T-24. Hopefully this prevents people from getting them via Plusgrade and preserving the status benefits.

Are plus grades processed before status upgrades?

I'm afraid they are.

Seriously? In every other case where I have seen an airline do this type of thing they make them available after upgrading status pax. On VX, which tends to have far fewer status passengers anyway, I would think this would be the case doubly so.

More to the point, if these are really processed before and are "name your price", if 6 seats are available and 6+ people make an offer, where the lowest offer is, say, 10 bucks, the passenger offering 10 bucks gets the seat, always, ahead of a status passenger. Why wouldn't any sane person just put an offer in for 10 bucks on every flight? Then this, yes, will mark the end of the status perk.

They force the lowest offer to be around the price of a T-24 upgrade from MC to MCS.

For instance, on DAL-DCA, the cost to upgrade from MC to MCS is $69. Plusgrade would not let my travelling companion submit an offer less than $60.

And the program definitely isn't available on all flights.



Still obnoxious, IMHO.