What do passengers react the best to? How can you increase traffic, by upgrading comfort or by lowering the ticket? Also, do low-cost airlines have any impact in-game?
No, the rating is generated based on your price to product and image rating. You can basically offer nothing and charge nothing (minimum price) or you can offer VERY much and you can charge much for the ticket.
The higher rating you have the larger is the chance that the passengers will pick you. It has been in the talks for long totally change the ORS and include price, time and service sensitive passengers, though we will have to wait and see for this one as nothing is currently announced.
Hi,
it works like CBE said. The booking system gives every flight a rating based on value for money and the time it takes to reach the destination.
In real life an airline can offer special fares that create or increase traffic. Offer cheap tickets to Firenze and some people will decide to make a city trip. People who would not take a flight without that special offer. In the game you cannot increase traffic. You can only try to get a bigger share of the existing traffic.
In real life you can attract passenger by offering tickets at 1 dollar. Real passengers may ignore the small printing that says you also have to pay for making your online booking, airport taxes, a piece of luggage, and so on. You cannot program software to think a ticket costs one dollar if the actual cost is 50 dollar. And if you could, the first player who figures out what triggers the software to think a ticket is cheap will make a fortune ;-)
In real life the race to the bottom is influenced by perception and emotion. Things that are very hard to translate into software. In the game, you would only have a race to the bottom.
If you want more traffic, you have to figure out where the passengers fly from/to. Lots of connections with low transfer times will get you passengers that don't have your hub as destination. And high ORS ratings will help too.
Jan
What about the time of the week the flight takes place?
I just started playing and before reading through the forums I set up my airline taking into account “weekend breaks”… All my schedule is organized to bring tourist to holiday destinations on fridays and thursdays and bring them back home on sundays. If i had to make a flight from “Wealthy Economy” to “Caribbean Island holiday” on a monday at 3 am I would charge it cheap because i expected nobody to flight it.
But I’m just starting to realize that passengers don’t give a damn what day of the week or time of the day the flight takes place… when I see my Wednesday’s 3am flights full and my friday afternoon flights empty…
Should i care about this factors to price my flights?
PAX don't care about weekend or night/day times. They fly and fly and fly...
Passengers are just as likely to fly on a Wednesday at 3AM as on a Friday afternoon. Day of the week doesn't matter, and time only matters as far as connecting to the next flight is concerned (and also, some airports are closed at night).
Thank you for your replies! Still, there is one more detail that I can't figure out. Does opening a station cost you anything? I want to know in order to decide if it's relevant to open a station for a 2x weekly flight or not. I see that most airlines prefer to fly daily or more.
Opening a station does not cost money but as soon as you are flying there you have to pay wages (check-in, ramp agents and cargo dispatcher).
Most flights to 4bars+ airports can be done daily. Don't know which routes you have in mind but in most cases I fly all routes at least once daily and even 3 bar airports are filling the planes with daily flights.
Give it a try, if not working daily then reduce the frequency!
I fly 4 times daily with A321s to IPH wich is a 2 bar airport. Flying to small airports is very profitable if you have monopoly and a decent feeder network.
Oh, ok, then I am going to wait for a more realistic version of airlinesim! Thank you so very much for your replies!