Low ORS ranking - what am I doing wrong?

English Boards Community Support
1

I’m managing my first airline. I started on Quimby 2 months ago, so I’m not a total rookie, but honestly - still struggling to understand how bloody ORS rankings are working.

Many of my connections are ranked inexplicably bad in comparison to other airlines, and I really can’t find legit reason why.

Look at this example: my ORD-DUR connection (Chicago to Durban), consists of 2 sections: long haul flight from Chicago - Johannesburg (operated by 777-200) + short flight JNB-DUR. This is clearly the cheapest (941$ for Y) and the shortest (18h22m) connection in ORS. Long haul section has best possible service, and the seats are of a good standard (Comfort in Y, my competitor use the same seats so this shouldn’t be a factor).

But yet somehow ORS finds 11 (!) other connections ranked higher than mine.

All of higher ranked connections are more expensive (1054-1132$ vs mine 941$ ) and longer as they all fly through Istanbul. The connection with the highest ranking for this route is +8 hours (!!!) longer than mine and more expensive.

It’s terribly frustrating and seems like a complete nonsense for me, but maybe I’m missing something? Can anyone explain what is the problem here?

2

Maybe take a look at the ORS ratings for the flights, not only for the complete route.
If you have a connection, the ORS from both flights are used to calculate the ORS of the connection. Time is also a factor.

3

Both of my sections have low rating, but I think the second flight has little impact on the total score as it is very short (460km, only 59 minutes) local connection.

My guess is that in this case, the reason for my poor overall ranking might be low score for the seats, due to super-long ORD-JNB section. This flight is almost 14000 km, and ‘Comfort’ seats score only 1 bar for this distance.

My competitor’s overall route distance is +2000 km longer than mine, but even though he uses the same type of seats, he gets higher score, because his route is divided into two sections of 7500+8500km (which gives him respectively 3 and 2 bars score for seats).

Still don’t think it makes sense (in terms of realistic representation of passengers’ preferences), but I guess that might be an explanation of how ORS works.