What?
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”.