Just a quick question here.
I know that extended out there are 3 "demand" calculations done for each flight.
But how long do you let this run to get an idea of how a route is actually doing?
3 days? 1 week? 2 weeks?
Thanks.
well, three days is the absolute minimum to actually have those flights take off, however, the demand distribution via ORS only considers connections that are arriving at their destination within 72 hours. therefor, if you wants give a new flight a chance to actually be completely and freshly booked with all available connections, I would give it at at least day four, as well.
since transfer pax of various flights have an influence on all your routes, feeder flights to this new flight might have already booked full on the first demand distribution, so fhey can only start feedin your new flight starting day four, where there are not yet all connecting flights available, pushing us to day five.
now, your competitors might react, their load factors shift - more or less depending on fleet sizes involved - and prices might be adjusted on all sides. you, too, could adjust prices before terminating a route.
so five days minimum (unless at server start where there are enough routes that book full, so no point in wasting time with those that don’t), if you want to see how the market reacts, two weeks plus.
now, personally, I would usually set up the route, check after two days and adjust prices if fully booked or hardly at all, check on day six (or four days after the price adjustment). adjust again if there’s still room, and wait another five days.
you can obviously continue doing that (and should for good routes), but If the new route isn’t working, I terminate it for the time being.
keep in mind, though, that a flight generating a small loss might still be worth it, if it carriers a lot of transport pax that fill up other flights.
Great. Thanks for the info. Trying to get a sense of time scales in this game. This does help with the planning.
Thanks again.
How far does price go in determining your share of the passengers. What I mean is, does being significantly cheaper than your competitors bring you more passengers? Will they for example avoid staying on your competitors planes and change to you to save a few bucks, will those who were going to take a mythical bus now see air travel as attractive (thus increasing the pool of pax)?
Or does it get to a point that if your $1 cheaper than everyone else, you will get the price sensitive customers and that's it?
Not really ... AS passengers prefer value to price, in other words, if you have bad service and bad seats and $100 it's quite possible that you actually get less passengers than a premium airline with better seats, better service and $150 price. Of course, lower price for any level of service will make you more attractive, but lowering the price works only to a certain extent, e.g. if a default price for certain level of service (e.g. $100) would give you x-number of passengers, $80 would give you more, but $60 may not necessarily give you more passengers than $80.
Also, there is no "generation" of passengers who would otherwise traveling by bus. Demand levels for all airports, regions, routes etc. are pre-set, and are only affcted by rising or declining AGEX (economy level index).
Passengers elect airlines in AS based on their value proposition which is reflected by ORS rating of the flight. For O/D passengers, the rating depends on:
- seats
- onboard service
- price
- image
Image in turn is affected by the
- sum of previous flights images
- aircraft condition
- aircraft age
- staff mood
- flight attendants
- seat pitch
They all combined give you an individual flight rating called ORS.
ORS can be maximum 100, but for most narrowbody aircraft you can only reach 99, or 98 in some cases, and turboprops can go only as high as 92.
Every flight is assigned two ORS ratings - the connection segment ORS and direct O/D ORS.
Direct O/D ORS is important for passengers booking just A-B flights.
For passengers booking A-B-C flights (or C-A-B, or A-B-C-D, with maximum of two connection points) what is important is the total route ORS which is calculated by a proprietary formula (not disclosed to players), but it's basically is the factor of individual flight connection segment ORS' for all flights on that connection trip, plus the total trip duration time factor.
To learn more I would suggest you read here, this post by player yukawa:
http://community.airlinesim.aero/topic/8123-as-for-beginners-an-attempted-blog/(especially posts 4-5-6)