Just had a thought as I was going through my routes this morning...
It might be interesting to add "interlining fees" into the system. What I mean is an airline sets up one of these fees with each of his interlining partners. It could be anywhere from $0 up to like $10 or whatever. Then, when demands are calculated, if you receive an interlining passenger from that particular airline, the "interlining fee" is tacked onto the price. It could also be looked at as a transfer fee.
The cost would be calculated into the ORS rating of the flight and passenger bookings adjusted accordingly. Any income could be shown in the flight detail report, without showing where the passengers came from specifically.
What this would do is allow people to increase (or decrease) route ORS rates, as well as interline more effectively with subsidiary/feeder airlines, alliance members, and other AS in-game "friends" to create strategies and further deepen the game.
No idea if this is possibly code-able or not. Just an idea. :)
Not sure how complex this actually is, but I agree, would be a very nice feature. Not only to generate additional cash flow, but moreover to influence passenger flow. For example to prevent passengers to use airport X to fly from A to B and rather choose Y, as X should keep capacities for others.
I am not sure, whether I got your point. I think it’s getting even more relevance, if the addionatial fee is not airline-wide, but related to distinct routes and may have negative values as well.
I did imagine a negative value to the fee, making it cheaper to fly certain flights, and I suppose it's certainly possible. When I posted, I did have a thought about why a negative might not work, but I don't remember it right off hand.
I don't know if it could be put onto specific routes. If you wanted cheaper flights on certain routes, wouldn't you just drop the price on those flights? If you mean adjusting the price per interlining agreement per route, that might end up being a lot of micro-managing. Part of the reason some people like simulations is the micro-managing, but I don't know how much that would add. If I have 20 interlining partners and 90 destinations, that's 1800 different potential prices. I know they wouldn't all be available on every route... it could certainly be possible if the code works that way.
though I agree that this would give you a lot more influence on the pax distribution, it sounds like it would be hard to code and might result in a lot of micro management.
Well, it needs to be limited. Either a general transfer fee or two, differentiating internal and external transfers. One per IL-partner is surely to much. With theses limitations, I think, it is manageable.
Dropping a routes price doesn’t control passenger routing, as it is not considering whether it is a transfer passenger or a direct one. A capacity based routing of transfer passenger, considering different hubs, would only be reliably possible, if you are able to influence prices for tranfers.
For example - one of my main hubs is PEK. As ever, this is airport is doomed to have filled slots. So, let’s say one passenger is currently travelling from SHE - PEK - HET, because it’s cheap, fast or both, but I rather want him to travel over TSN, which is probably more expensive or slower, I have no real mean to influence this. I could generally raise prices at PEK or lower them at TSN, but that will then influence direct flights as well.
Basically, you have to deal with tradeoffs if you currently want to deal with this. I think this idea actually fits into the limited-slots idea, as it open new ways, to influence markets.