Hi,
On Quimby I have an airline based in Trinidad and Tobago. My routes between Port of Spain POS and Tobago TAB have no bookings, apart from connecting traffic. Is this a bug? Other routes perform fine, and POS-TAB is a route pair with multiple daily flights in the real world.
Same on Nicosia: Load factor dropped from nearly 100 percent to 3.
So you’re saying this drop occurred recently?
The low demand exists since the last release.
I’ll investigate. We had a change in how relative demand data is processed, but a.) this shouldn’t have this effect and b.) that already happened mid-May.
Okay, I stepped through the code a bit and I found the issue, I think. What I am not sure about is why there has been a sudden change in that behavior…it should have been like this (basically) forever.
The core issue is that there’s a magic number in our traffic generation code that says that any pair of airports less than 100km away from each other will never have direct demand. This isn’t a new rule, though.
When looking at this, I found that the “ground networks” for POS and TAB make no sense at all, either. Which is likely true for the majority of the Caribbean.
I figure a sensible pair of rules for direct traffic between two airports would be the following:
- No ground network: traffic allowed
- Within ground network: minimum distance 100km
My first intuition was that a ground network automatically means “no traffic”, but that’s not necessarily true (people will fly short distances if it is convenient/faster) and we prevent intra-city flights with a different set of rules.
That said, even if I adjust the rule as described above, it would still only really work with a fixed set of ground connections. So any (proper) fix will likely take a while: I can do the code change immediately, but the data fixes will probably take some time.
Actually same issue on ellinikon. Trafic drop since calendar week 21
The 100km rule seems to be only true for economy passengers as I have O and D business on a 60km flight but only the occasional single passenger in economy who is connecting.
Maybe ground connections on either end? Those look like “local” traffic in the stats (not like a transfer).