Celebrity Move Up Program: 7 Proven Things You Must Know Before You Bid
If you’ve booked a Celebrity Cruise and found yourself eyeing a higher cabin category, you’ve probably come across the Celebrity Move Up program. It sounds straightforward — bid on an upgrade, maybe win, maybe don’t. But after one successful Move Up bid and one deliberate decision to skip it, we’ve learned there’s a lot more nuance to it than most posts let on. Here’s our honest experience, with real numbers.
What is Celebrity Move Up?
Celebrity Move Up is Celebrity’s bidding program that allows booked guests to bid on an upgrade to a higher cabin category. After booking your sailing, you’ll receive an email invitation to bid — typically a few months before departure. You set your bid per person within a range Celebrity provides, and if accepted, your credit card is charged and you’re moved to the new category.
Simple enough. But the details matter a lot.
1. Check Stateroom Availability Before You Bid — The Trick Most People Miss
Before deciding how much to bid — or whether to bid at all — do this first: go through Celebrity’s booking process anonymously as if you were a new customer selecting a stateroom. Don’t log in. Just browse available cabins in the category you’re considering bidding on.
What you find will tell you a lot. If you’re looking to move up to the retreat and suites are plentiful, then demand is low and a minimum or near-minimum bid has a real chance. If suites are scarce, minimum bids are likely to fail and the minimum itself will probably be higher.
This single step takes five minutes and changes how you approach the entire bidding decision. Frankly, this trick applies to bidding to upgrade on any cruise line. We’re surprised more people don’t talk about it.
2. How We Decided to Bid Minimum — And Why It Worked
In April 2025 we sailed the Celebrity Apex on a 7-night repositioning cruise from Barcelona to Southampton. We had booked through our travel agent a Prime Concierge Infinite Veranda stateroom with a package that included premium drinks and premium Wi-Fi. Our all-in cost for two was $4,786.
When the Move Up invitation arrived, we were offered the chance to bid on a Sky Suite, among other higher level staterooms. The minimum bid was $630 per person — and notably, the Move Up page announced that Celebrity had reduced minimum bids for this sailing. We ran the anonymous availability check described above. There were a lot of Sky Suites still available.
Why were there reduced minimum bids and loads of suite availability? Our theory was threefold. First, Edge class ships like the Apex have a large number of suites relative to older Celebrity ships. Second, this was a repositioning cruise which is often discounted and frequently with lower demand. Third, this was the first sailing after dry dock, which makes people nervous – would the ship be ready for our sailing?
Cruise vloggers John & Louie’s Big Adventures advocate for bidding “halfway and a dollar” — splitting the difference between minimum and maximum. Given what we saw with availability, that didn’t seem necessary. We bid the minimum: $630 per person, $1,260 total.
On April 1st, five days before our April 6th sailing, we received an email confirming our bid was accepted.
3. What You Actually Get With a Move Up Win — And What You Don’t
This is the part most Move Up posts gloss over, and it’s the most important thing to understand before you bid.
When you win a Move Up bid, you get many of the benefits of the new stateroom category, but not all. For example, when upgrading to a retreat stateroom, you receive the suite cabin itself — larger room, butler service, larger private veranda, access to Luminae restaurant, and access to the Retreat Lounge, among other things. These were genuinely excellent and absolutely worth having.
What you do NOT get:
If you had already purchased a drinks package or Wi-Fi package separately, those do not get replaced by suite inclusions. Suites booked outright include premium drinks and premium Wi-Fi as standard. Win via Move Up and you keep whatever you originally booked — nothing more, nothing less.
For us this wasn’t a problem because we’d already locked in premium drinks and Wi-Fi at a steep discount after we’d booked. But if you’re in a base cabin with no packages and you win a Move Up to a suite, you still won’t have drinks or Wi-Fi included unless you purchase them separately. Factor that into your true cost of the upgrade.
4. The Full Financial Breakdown — Honest Numbers
Most Move Up posts are vague about actual costs. Here’s exactly what ours looked like:
A Sky Suite on this sailing booked outright would have cost approximately $6,700 for two when we booked. Our actual all-in cost:
- Concierge Infinite Veranda for two with premium drinks and Wi-Fi: $4,786
- Premium drinks package upgrade (for two): $150
- Premium Wi-Fi upgrade (for two): $84
- Move Up bid (minimum, $630pp): $1,260
- Total: $6,280
We sailed in a Sky Suite for approximately $420 less than booking it outright — with drinks and Wi-Fi already covered from our original booking.
One additional difference worth noting: onboard credit. As a Concierge booking we received $150 on board credit. Suite guests receive $250, but not when you upgrade via Move Up. That $100 difference won’t change the overall math dramatically but it’s real money toward specialty dining or spa treatments.
The key caveat: if we hadn’t already secured a good package deal, the math would have looked different. If you’re starting from a base cabin without packages, factor in the cost of premium drinks and Wi-Fi before deciding whether the Move Up bid is genuinely worth it.
5. Captain’s Club Points — The Hidden Cost Nobody Mentions
Here’s something almost no Move Up post covers, and it matters if you’re working toward Captain’s Club status.
When you win a Move Up bid, you earn Captain’s Club points at your original cabin rate — not the suite rate. Celebrity awards points per night as follows:
- Inside & Ocean View: 2 points per night
- Regular veranda: 3 points per night
- Concierge or AquaClass: 5 points per night
- Sky and Aqua Sky suites: 8 points per night
- … and up it goes
We sailed in a Sky Suite but earned points at the Concierge rate — 5 per night, 35 points total for our 7-night sailing. Had we booked the suite outright we’d have earned 56 points. That’s 21 points lost on a single sailing, which compounds significantly if you’re sailing multiple times a year and chasing Elite or Elite Plus status.
We’re currently Classic members working toward Select, so those points matter to us. On a shorter sailing the gap is smaller, but on a 7-night it’s meaningful.
6. When We Chose NOT to Bid — The Celebrity Xcel Preview Cruise
The Celebrity Xcel Preview Cruise in November 2025 offered a useful contrast that sharpened our thinking about when Move Up makes sense and when it doesn’t.
The minimum bid to move from a Guaranteed Infinite Veranda to a Sky Suite on the Xcel was $800 per person — $1,600 total, significantly higher than our Apex experience. The base price for our sailing without drinks or wi-fi was $2,367. If we won the bid, the upgrade itself would have accounted for 40% of the total cost, before adding drinks or Wi-Fi.
We ran the same anonymous availability check. Unlike the Apex, there weren’t many Sky Suites available. This made sense — a brand new ship’s first sailings generate significant excitement and stateroom demand runs high.
With fewer available suites, a higher minimum bid, and stronger demand, the odds of a minimum bid succeeding were lower and the cost was higher. We passed. It was the right call.
The contrast between these two decisions — bid minimum on the Apex, skip entirely on the Xcel — illustrates exactly why the availability check in tip #1 is so important. The same bid strategy doesn’t work in every situation.
7. How to Decide: A Simple Framework for Every Move Up Decision
Based on our experience across both sailings, here’s the framework we use when a Move Up invitation arrives:
Step 1 — Check availability anonymously. If staterooms in your target category are plentiful, minimum or near-minimum bid is worth trying. If they’re scarce, either skip or bid meaningfully higher — but temper expectations accordingly.
Step 2 — Factor in your existing packages. If you’ve locked in drinks and Wi-Fi at a good price, a Move Up win won’t take those away. If you haven’t, calculate the true cost of the upgrade including what you’ll spend on packages before deciding.
Step 3 — Consider sailing length for points. On a 7-night sailing the difference between Concierge points (35) and Suite points (56) is meaningful. On a shorter 3 or 4-night sailing it matters less.
Step 4 — Consider the sailing type. Repositioning cruises, post dry-dock sailings, and less popular itineraries tend to have more upgraded stateroom availability and lower minimums. New ship sailings and popular itineraries are the opposite.
Step 5 — Do the honest math. Add your bid cost to your original booking cost. Compare it to what the upgraded stateroom would have cost outright including packages. Factor in OBC and points. Then decide.
Our Verdict — And What We Did Next
We loved the Sky Suite experience enough that for our next Celebrity sailing — a 7-night Mediterranean cruise aboard the Celebrity Xcel from Barcelona in June 2026 — we booked the Sky Suite outright rather than trying Move Up again.
The math was simply different this time. On a 7-night sailing, premium drinks and Wi-Fi for two easily exceed $1,000. The difference between an Infinite Veranda and a Sky Suite booked outright was $2,500. Subtract the package value and we were effectively paying around $1,000 for Luminae, the Retreat Lounge, the butler, and the larger veranda, among other benefits. That felt worth it — especially knowing we’d earn suite-rate Captain’s Club points (56 instead of 35) on a sailing where those points matter to us.
The Move Up program is a genuine opportunity to experience a suite at a meaningful discount. But only if the conditions are right and you go in with clear eyes about what transfers and what doesn’t.
Have you used Celebrity Move Up? We’d love to hear how it went — drop your experience in the comments.