This is a suggestion to improve Inventory page with information missing from old Route Management.
In old RM it was quickly obvious how many flights your airline operated on the route by quickly glancing on the number of flights listed on the top of the screen. You could also quickly see if competition operated the flights on the give route or not.
My suggestion is to put the following information on the Inventory page (and it could be placed right under load summary):
Number of own lights operated by day, and whether the competition operates the flights, eventually the total number of flights operated per day on that route.
This information could be displayed in 3 ways:
Option 1
Own flights: 4
Competition: yes
Option 2
Own flights: 4
Competition: 7
Option 3
Own flights: 4
Total flights: 11
All 3 options provide the same result (there is a competition on the route), but they differ in the detail provided. Option 1 is the exact translation of old route management - if there was no competition, only own flights would be shown under old route management. Option 2 and Option 3 are more detailed and advanced and offer direct or indirect information on the number of competitor's flights and total number of flights respectively.
Just a thought to make the Market Analysis more "intuitive" and easier to "quickly make sense of".
(Grouping by flight number was the first step in right direction).
What about differentiation by cell alignment?
Own flights, aligned to the right.
Competitor's flights, aligned to the left.
In the render below, it looks pretty neat and intuitive at first sight. You will subconsciously look right for your own flights, and left for the competitor's flights. This will make the whole Market Analysis page less cluttered and much quickly possible to analyze.
After adjusting to new interface, I think this page gonna be the next most strategic page that can be more powerful than the previous route management.
Some relayout might increase the productivity and usefulness, i think. Also I just realized, we could also tune the price in this page, I don't think it was there before.
so some more suggestion:
1. Marketshare information on top of the page would be nice, make the page more sense at first glance. Squeeze a bit to only take half of the space, and the other half can be used to display historic capacity and price, also squeezed to only display last 4-8 weeks, should be enough for strategic decision.
2. Current availability should be on bottom of the page, so in trunk routes, it wouldn't hide the marketshare information and airport pair setting which are more important tools. Anyone who interested to dig down competitors availability can continue scroll down the page while everyone else get the best view of the most important information on the page, the market analysis.
3. A rating similar in ORS could also be added to Current Availability, make the market analysis more robust. Other additional information such as airlines weekly frequency would also be a nice additional, place below the market share information.
I disagree, I consider availability and clear and quick access to it much more important and strategic information than graphs and pie charts. Having graphs on top and availability buried in the bottom is a no go for me. Also players have been complaining that after RM has been gone they cannot quickly and clearly see state of their bookings and competitors’ and how they stand in comparison. Cluttering it with market share graphs is not what those players want (and neither do I), clean and clear availability and being able to quickly see one’s own, and competitor’s flights that are fully booked and that are bookable is, and should be, the main purpose of Market Analysis page.
And the route settings such as price can be adjusted in Inventory, no need to make Market Analysis cluttered with redundant price adjustment tools.
As for point 3, Martin has expressed in other thread that he has no intention to publish ORS ratings anywhere else besides the ORS checker.
Availability will not be buried in the bottom, as graph and others barely take half of the screen height. The availability is now actually bury other information and tools, especially on trunk routes where many airlines having multiple frequencies, where you have to scroll all the way down just to see how well you are performing in the market.
A good information system doesn't have to follow what people would like to do with the system but instead thinking out of the box about how people's business processes can be improved by using the system. The use case for Market Analysis is how player would analyze the market intuitively (via market share and capacity history) and make necessary adjustment (via airport pair setting - no, it's not redundant), and if necessary, they can also drill down detail competitor booking by checking the availability to make further adjustment to your strategy (new aircraft, changing seat config, etc).
Martin, any thoughts about inventory and market analysis improvements as I suggested in posts 1 and 2?
"Thoughts", yes. Time to implement right now, no. I hope I can do another day of polishing some time over the next weeks, but currently I'm swamped with other stuff.
