In essence, a “fare” is the price charged for a flight between two markets (could be two individual airports, but also custom groups of airport) under certain conditions (the fare rules and routing rules).
In its basic form, the fares feature in AS would comprise:
creating/managing fares for individual airport pairs
defining prices per booking class
basic routing rules (like maximum amount of stops)
some standard mechanism to solve interlining compensation (how much money is paid to the operator of an interlining segment)
Why?
The foundational motivation of the ASTD was/is to enable different business models in AirlineSim. One aspect of that is diversified demand, the other is diversified supply. What this means is that players must be able to design a highly customised product offering to differentiate themselves from the competition. To keep the complexity that comes with this manageable, fares serve as the connecting element between advanced interlining, fare rules and booking classes. They also untangle scheduling and pricing, which have historically been very much intertwined in AirlineSim.
When?
Ideally, fares should be introduced together with custom booking classes, but technically, they could be added on top of the existing structure where the three existing service classes are treated as “three static booking classes”.
More importantly I think, is when a player reached a degree of having more than several hundred routes, there should be ways to automate control of fare universally based on load factor and other factors (with the player being respponsible for setting conditions etc), so that excessive micromanagement wouldn’t be needed, to preserve playability of the game as airlines grow in size. (While still keeping ability to impose individual modifier on e.g. flights that doesn’t hit hub connection bank)
This sounds like another feature in and of itself, inspired by the real world: Revenue Management
Which, actually, would make a lot of sense and I should add it to the roadmap eventually. Although it’s a tricky one to get right: You want to avoid being able to run airlines, especially large ones, on “auto-pilot”, both because it might become boring for the players themselves, but it might also be problematic for competing airlines because large airlines might “automatically” out-compete them. Right now, at least someone has to invest the time and effort to manually check 10k flights before they can undercut you
I don’t think it would result auto pilot.
Let say I assume it is possible that routes are being put into group, let say for an North American airlines, the pplayer can set conditions like “All route <1000km” “US and Canadian route 1000<x<3000km” “Route to Latin America >1000km” “Routes to European countries (User pick a list of countries that applies)” “Other long haul routes”,
and then within each of these groups, players can set different base fare conditions, like US$ (100+0.2*n-km), then (with booking class and individual travel request generation) set that 50% economy class are available for fare -35% from the base fare rule, 30% at +/-0%, then 35% at +50% fare of base fare for example for each group, but specific route groups like those to Hawaii will have more cheaper booking class available to correspond to more leisure travelers, while those for Germany and London might have more expensive booking class to correspond to nature of travelers, and then user can further decide how the booking class distribution and fare can be dynamically changed according to the speed of which the booking class are getting filled.
And then players can further apply additional modifiers onto individual flights if they depart at bad time slot (Like away from hub time, or early morning late night flights if airlinesim is to take into account these in the future)
So I guess it do involvle a lot more than just “fare”.
