This is a frequently asked question … why are competitor’s flights full and mine have just a few bookings when my ORS rating is better or equal as my competitor.
First of all, there is ORS rating for direct flights and for connecting flights.
AirlineSim is based on connections, so a well functioning airline in AirlineSim will have only a portion of passengers flying direct , most will be connecting passengers. If your airline is new, most likely you are capturing only direct passengers, you can see that in the flight detail / flight costing. You will see passengers from internal and external feeder.
If you do not have connections you will only capture direct passengers. For example on route A to B you can capture 20 passengers. But your competitor captures 100, how is that possible. Simply, your competitor has connections and he also flies people from A to B who are flying in from C, D, E, F etc. connecting in A for all of them to fly to B. So they may have 10 passengers flying C A B , 10 passengers flying D A B , etc. All of those passengers help fill the plane.
If you have good individual route rating for direct passengers, your connection rating Will also be good when you start offering connections.
Your connecting passengers will wait maximum 8 hours for connection abut usually really do not like your connections if they have to wait 3 or more hours, and usually 2 or more hours for very short trips is too much. The longer their journey is in distance the more time they are willing to wait, but the more connection offers there exist on marketplace. In other words if you fly from London to Sydney you do not expect to wait just 2 hours in Dubai, you might be willing to wait 4 hours, for example. But you will not wait 4 hours in London if you travel from Amsterdam to Glasgow via London.
You must also observe minimum connection time at your hub airport, this is the minimum you must allow for passengers to connect from one plane to another.
Passengers that sit on the plane can connect to the next destination the aircraft travels to even if connection time is less than the minimum.
Also passengers will not connect to destinations if their journey through your hub is longer than 2.5 times the direct distance between their origin and destination.
A good network building strategy is for the aircraft that arrived from the east to continue to west, the one that arrived from south to continue north, etc.
Remember that you must observe minimum connection time for your hub airport in order for your hub to work properly. For this reason you should time your arriving flights before a cut off time, and then program your departing flights after your wave start time. So The formula is “arrival cutoff time + minimum connection time = hub wave start time”. Most players add one additional minute to minimum connection time in order to account for time rounding issues. Players usually chose hub waves every 6 or 8 hours or in certain places maybe every 12 hours.
If you have internal networking enabled (default setting) passengers will connect among your own flights, on airports that have transfer enabled. Please note that not all the airports are transfer enables, usually you cannot transfer at smaller airports. You can still continue on the same aircraft to the next destination though, which could look like internal transfer on the flight detail / costing page.
For your passengers to connect with other airlines you need to have interline agreement with them. Without that, your passengers n will not be able to connect to their network. Please not that even if you are within Alliance, you must sign individual interline agreements.
Hope this helps.