I'm trying to figure out what is the best approach for small traffic airports, e.g. 1 or 2 bar airports.
Is it better to have one flight per day for all 7 days?
Is it better to just have 1 flight per week?
Or is it better to have 2 flight per week, say 1 on Tue and 1 on Fri, allowing for the 3 days in ORS?
What I'm trying to ask (unsuccessfully :) ) is how the PAX distribution works? Is it a fixed amount of PAX per day? So for e.g. there is 50 people every day that would go from A to B? In this case you can have 1 flight per day?
Is it 50 people per week? In this case it would not make sense to have 1 flight per day.
Once every 24 hours, passengers are generated at an airport and will choose between all flights (direct or connections) to a particular destination that start during the next 3 days. So if you have one daily flight, then every day those passengers will have 3 flights to choose from (the next flight, the day after, and the day after that), whereas with one flight every 3 days, then every day they will have only one flight to choose from (the one that departs in less than 72 hours).
So on a very low demand route with no other competition, if your planes fly mostly empty, then you may be able to fill them more easily if you consolidate them in one flight every 3 days (though you could consider changing to a smaller airplane instead), as all passengers will still have a flight to book. Anything less than that and you will be missing passengers (for instance, if you have 1 flight per week, then that means for 4 days per week your passengers will have no flight to book).
The key to filling low demand routes, however, is to offer connecting flights to bigger airports. Very few passengers will fly direct from 2 airports with 1 green bar each if there's no ongoing or incoming connection.
I would slightly correct this, bookings are made on flights that arrive to their destination within 72 hours. For example, A to B must arrive to B (either direct A to B or via hub A to C to B ) within 72 hours of the demand calculation time at A in order to be included in that particular demand calculation time. A flight A to C to B that departs from A at 70 hours but arrive to B at 73 hours from the A’s demand calculation time will not be included and booked.
I would slightly correct this, bookings are made on flights that arrive to their destination within 72 hours. For example, A to B must arrive to B (either direct A to B or via hub A to C to B ) within 72 hours of the demand calculation time at A in order to be included in that particular demand calculation time. A flight A to C to B that departs from A at 70 hours but arrive to B at 73 hours from the A's demand calculation time will not be included and booked.
Correct, but the result is the same, regardless if it’s the departure or arrival time.
The flight that arrives 73h from your point zero arrives 49h (or 25 or 1h) from someone elses point zero, hence it shouldn’t make a difference - unless you and your competitor both only offer just one weekly flight.
Yes if you have many connections/interlines at your hub etc it does not matter. But I was talking strictly about A to B (and A to B via C) as a single flight.