I know that company image (shown in dashboard; affecting 'Product Overall') is factored with passengers experience and does not change drastically overnight. Nonetheless, I have some doubts about how long these experiences matters on company image.
I don’t know if it’s based on a timespan of carried passengers or on all-time carried passengers, solely.
If it’s based on all passengers ever carried by the company, the effect of the first passenger carried by the company will ever be counted, assymptotically losing its weight.
Let’s suppose that a company has ever carried +100 million passengers, whereon half of them evaluated flights with an image overall of 15 and the other half evaluated it as 45. Will the company image, simply as that, be a weighted arithmetic mean resulting on 30, independent of time?
Or, do we have an algorithm that counts weighted experiences (older experiences being less weighted) within past few weeks/months? In this case, an old company will not have the experiences of its first passengers counted anymore, what from my point of view is the most fair proposition.
These differences matter, since companies starting with old planes must grow and renew its fleet pretty faster if all-historic passengers does count - and ever count - for the company image formula. The strategy of this game depends a lot on this formula and this is not pretty clear, I think.
I don’t want you, AS developers, to reveal the algorithm, but I want a clue about this issue, then I’ll be myself able to review my optimal strategy to be taken.
This doubt is really disturbing me! Is the passenger experience forever or not? In other words, does it assymptotically loses its importance or does it have a ‘valid date’?
I don't see any kind of time variable being applied. With my main carrier, the economy image rating has been slooooooowly going up for a long time. I recently did a lot of upgrades to all my planes, especially in economy class, and saw no significant jump in image rating that would indicate a time-weighted formula is being utilized. It's an interesting idea, and one I would suggest, but I don't think it's there now.
Hope SK doesn't get upset at you for bumping all the old topics.
time has to play a role: i shut down an airline (killing all flights and leasing, firing all staff ...) and my ratings went down from 4 green to neutral within some weeks (i don't remember the right time).
I don't see any kind of time variable being applied. With my main carrier, the economy image rating has been slooooooowly going up for a long time. I recently did a lot of upgrades to all my planes, especially in economy class, and saw no significant jump in image rating that would indicate a time-weighted formula is being utilized. It's an interesting idea, and one I would suggest, but I don't think it's there now.
Hope SK doesn't get upset at you for bumping all the old topics.
Hi,
I agree with you. My Egyptian airline is 4 years old. During the first two years half of the fleet consisted of 734's and 735's. The last two years it only leased/bought new planes. During these last two years, airline image has slowly gone up from 65 to 69. As my other airlines all have an image above 80, and my Egyptian airline uses the same business model, the (more than two year) old flights must still contribute to the current airline image.
And Sascha has no reason to be upset. If the team had answered that question one year ago, George would not have bumped it. George actually deserves a medal for looking through the forum before asking a question ;-)
I wonder whether this also effects the down-side, i.e. if I am running a 5-bar airline with no flights for 2 years, I can make profit of the developed image afterwards during the next months without investing in service quality. And, as it even don’t seem to be volume weighted, I can cheat a lot of people until they understand, that their image is somehow wrong.
Is this bug using? Probably not. However, it is showing, that this system is actually wrong. And - as it effects ORS - from my point of view, too core to be wrong.
Start an Airline in Jun’14, fly 1 aircraft with top-seats etc for a short period of time, until you reach a solid, let’s say 85 to 90 point rating. Cancel the flight. Keep that company until let’s say Dez’15 and than make profit out of the image.
A bit less time consuming and less cheating, is to do the same with a shorter period of time and delivering still high quality afterwards. By starting a unprofitable “one high quality flight”-company for the first weeks you are well prepared for a kickstart, based on a high image afterwards.
I am currently experiencing the opposite, as I have started an airline three weeks before I started flights. It’s a pain until image is recovering.
I see your point. But on the otherside, it is also possible to reach a 99 points ORS without your construction. And when multiple airlines are having 99 ORS on the same route, it is down to price. So way take such a hassel on a time consuming strategy?
As you are saying - it is comming down to the price. I.e. I can achieve higher prices, still reaching a 99 ORS rating.
In terms of the flip site referred earlier (it’s a 300m AS kick start investment in a new market) I am currently burning about 3m each week to improve image and to keep a 99 ORS rating. My fault not driving image early will cost roughly 30m at the end of the day. Not that I was willing to burn some AS to enter a new market, but actually I was planning to invest this for competition reasons, not for some minor system flaws. Well, I depreciate that as transaction costs. ^^ It’s certainly more the volume I might have gain otherwise, that worries me.
Start an Airline in Jun'14, fly 1 aircraft with top-seats etc for a short period of time, until you reach a solid, let's say 85 to 90 point rating. Cancel the flight. Keep that company until let's say Dez'15 and than make profit out of the image.
While your airline was shut down for a year and a half, the other airlines are going to also raise their image, and at the same time get a massive amount of money. Image has an effect on overall rating, but it isn't that much, and I don't see it as an exploit or cheating to do something like that.
You might want to establish a regional daughter later on to save categorie costs or extend flight numbers. So you benefit from doing that early, even if you don’t schedule flights.
You might want to enter a satisfied market with narrow slots and you are waiting for another player to quit.
The effect on the overall rating might not be “that much”, but from my experiences, it’s enough to be recognized either within the ticket price or the rating.
I am probably not being clear. I just woke up, so I'll try to be more succinct. ;)
I started in Aspern on November 27th, 2013. It is now June 6th, 2014. That's seven months. After those seven months, my image rating is over 85 for all seats and cargo. Even if we are just going with my main hub that I started at, I have over 3100 departures weekly, which pulls in approximately $155 million a week. If someone came in now (or seven months later), I wouldn't care if they have a high image rating. My established routes (not to mention my other hubs) would make it difficult for them to survive. Simply put, it would be such a small impact it shouldn't bother any established airline.
I can see how it would create a disparity between two "starting" airlines with all else being equal, but nothing else is equal. The only time it would have impact would be at the start of a server, when everyone is on the same level. Once you get past that, nothing is equal. Waiting those months actually puts you at a big disadvantage unless you have hundreds of millions of dollars to compete with the larger airlines. You could, possibly, get some routes that aren't getting anyone. Find airports people are not using, but if you do that, then image doesn't matter at all. You'll get the passengers because they want to travel, no matter the ORS or image rating... unless you strap them to the outside of the fuselage with bungee. ;)
You are making some diffrent assumptions than me. Within this logic your logic I totally agree. But world may look different, as you might not start with a plain market or you habe good reasons not to enter a new market today, but in a few months. (Time Resources, AGEX, strategy, cash, etc.)
Incumbents are always having an advantage and entrance barriers in a satisfied AS market are high. But that’s not my point. All that I am saying, is that image is influencing the ORS and thus has a economic value. And further, the current system has some flaws and can be manipulated.
A new entrant can’t built only on this advantage, that’s fairly true. Again comming back to my previous own experience. If I would have started the same airline three months earlier, I would have significantly more return and volume today. (And I am competing with a 80% market share player. But in some countries, there are more slots than demand, especially in times of low AGEX and one actually has the opportunity to change the game.)
80-something image gives you 8-10 point boost in ORS, depending on class.
You can get 80-something ORS AFTER the very first flight, with a brand new plane, 5-star service in Y/C and premium seats. You do not even need 5-bar employee satisfaction.
I know, because I tested it.
So no need to set up airlines months in advance ... if you are planning on starting with brand new planes, you can get very high image right from the beginning.
But as I wrote in another thread, in saturated markets it is difficult to start with 3, 4 or even 10 planes. You need maybe 20+ JET planes to make reasonable connections ad get internal transfers from the get-go. To do that, you either need to invest lots of money (under big risk) and get all new planes, or invest less (under lower risk) and get used planes such as MDs or 737 classics, but in such case do not expect your image to grow beyond 30-40. One of my airlines on established servers, was set up in USA, with this strategy, as a new holding/account the only option was to get cheap planes, but with the image-boosting strategy from the get-go (besides plane age). The image quickly passed the 20-point mark after a week, but it's been hovering around 30 for weeks now (30 economy, 35 business, 40 cargo) with about 0.1 per week increase.
In this case, there is an important strategic decision to make: given the flight profitability with old planes (e.g. MD82/88's) using specific service/seating/pricing strategy, no new aircraft comes even close with flight profitability, in spite of high maintenance costs. New planes will boost image, old planes will make it grow at snail pace. Better image (after several months) will allow me to charge more, because of the ORS boost ... but I may not still be getting the same profit as with the old planes. But with the old planes the image will be growing slowly and might not reach a value of 50 in years.
The problem with trying to "bump" your image and then wait a while is that all the flights are weighted starting at the beginning. If your first flight gets you an image rating of 90 for economy, and has 100 economy passengers on that flight, and the next flight (no matter when it takes places) has a rating of 80 for economy and also has 100 economy passengers, you're going to end up with an image of right around 85. The image calculation is immediate and cumulative, which means every successive flight is going to use the current image factor of the company, and then update that current image factor for the next flight in line.
You can test this by checking when the image on the airline (and flight information) changes. The best time to do this is when you start a new company, as the jump will be most noticeable, especially on the flight information page.