I’m tired of seeing these mega airlines on temporary worlds with hundreds of interlining agreements. Its not a reasonable strategy its basically cheating the system at this point. it basically makes it that at some point every major airport is a hub airport for them so they can send dozens of flights anywhere large and it will almost always fill up. Plus it overloads the OSR system so a two airport connection between 2-3 airlines now has dozens of airlines qualifying if they just interline with everyone. and when you’re making millions of profits a day the interlining fees don’t do anything.
I can see your point, but I doubt we’ll touch this in current-generation AS as a standalone project. Long-term, the better solution would be to actually model the two things conflated in the current IL system separately:
- Interlining as such is mostly about commercial terms…things like ticketing, who’s responsible for refunds etc.
- Actually facilitating transfers is a matter of operations and should be the the thing that incurs most of the direct costs.
There are good reasons not every airport that could technically support transfers in the real world is also a hub. I’d rather model these over introducing arbitrary limits that merely alleviate symptoms.
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My understanding is that, in real world, every East Asia airport with intercontential flights to NA are transfer hub between NA and SEA. The only recent they aren’t all airlines base and transfer hub is because their transfer oppoturnity are limited by frequency which in turn being limited by local demand and transfer demand, both to NA and also to other airports in the region.
Therefore with AS level of demand, real world will probably be more like AS, I personally think
Tiered interlining would be nice. EG -Tier 1 your own subsidiaries, Tier 2 Alliance members, Tier 3 other airlines.
Come to think of it, I think in real life airlines like Alaska Airlines do have quite a lot of interline agreement, but it didn’t happen to more other major airlines, and I guess one of the main reason behind that is probably antitrust lawsuits?
Most airlines tend to interline with each other, United ILs with both Delta and American. This allows some operational flexibility during IROPs. I think tiered ILs would be the best.
- Teir 1 - 8 points - 4x Normal Cost - Only companies owned by the player
- Teir 2 - 6 points - 3x Normal Cost - Only open to alliance members
- Teir 3 - 2 points - 2x Normal Cost - Open to anyone
- Teir 4 - 0 points - 1x Normal Cost - Open to anyone
So this is based on the current ORS system.
- When requesting an IL agreement you can select the level you want and then they can either approve or deny it like normal.
- You can adjust the level by canceling and creating a new agreement
- The points are added to the ORS score as a boost to a standard connection. In real life, DL will push an internal connection before a partner connection.
This would allow you the ability to tailor your partners a little. It annoys me in-game when my express flights are beet out by a partner like I want people flying my airlines first.
Soon you would have just one or two alliances on the servers 
That’s most long term servers.
That doesn’t really make realistic sense?
Well, airlines do place certain airlines and connections higher on their list than others. So how would you suggest doing it?
Ideally, you would be able to have a lot more control, I am trying to find an easily implemented solution.
It’s complicated 
It’s not the airlines, per se. Sure, if you book via United’s website, you obviously will only find United flights and those of their closest partners, wit results sorted in whatever way pleases United.
But if you book through travel agents, who in turn would usually be connected to a GDS, there are very clear rules on how results are sorted (by default). This is one (if not the only) reason why codeshare exists: Connections “of a single airline” are always sorted above mixed ones.
In current-gen ORS, I almost certainly won’t attempt to address this issue. But there are several individual components to a solution on the roadmap for the DS (Codeshare, GDS/BSPs, Distribution Channels, to name a few).