After a week of pain(e), I think I figured out a strategy.
Apparently the trick is to offer feeder flights at a discount, to get the connecting flights filled.
But that comes with another issue: now I am essentially cannibalizing my home market for myself and other players with a Ryanair approach - and I get my seats filled - but am likely to still lose connecting flights because the plane now is full too early.
What I would really like to see is a two-tiered ticket price structure: one for point to point flights, one for connecting flights. That would allow me to offer flights at a competitive rate that will attract customers with a limited budget without throwing away margin for point to point connections.
Not sure if that is planned. But if not, it should be taken into consideration. Otherwise, the spoke and hub-approach is, imho, dead.
I would like to make a suggestion that I believe is very important, given the new method of calculating demand/reservations.
In real life, connecting flight prices are often not calculated leg-by-leg, but rather by route, and they are often cheaper than direct flights.
Therefore, my suggestion is to create a way to price flights differently.
I know this would be a huge challenge, so a simpler way to start would be to leave three options in the companyās settings tab:
Connecting Flight Fares:
Default: The current mode (Prices calculated leg-by-leg)
Route: The price is calculated based on a direct flight between the origin and destination
Economic: The price is adjusted to a value between 5% and 10% below the price of a direct flight between the origin and destination.
I believe this will not only make it more realistic, but also allow the maintenance of economic models like HUB Distributionās.
Agreed. This will be a fantastic idea. But for indirect routings like LHR-DEN-BOS, if the airline charges a fare close to direct LHR-BOS, then it will be selling at a loss. So, probably a feature to turn off certain connections?
I think it would be very complex to implement exceptions or specific cases at this stageā¦ itās easier for us players to adapt to the new reality.
I think something feasible and simpler, but that could help, would be the option (or even leaving it as the default) to differentiate between connections and layovers. In the case of layovers, maintaining the price per legā¦
What I am struggling to understand at the moment is the distribution of passengers on a route throughout the day.
E.g. I am operating SAW-ADB five times a day with the same aircraft, same seating and same prices, so all of the flights have the same ORS rating. Yet some flights are sold out, some are barely half filled. And thatās with no connection passengers whatsoever.
I am not even opposed to the idea of assymetric demand throughout the day - it happens in real life as well. But Iād love to understand if there is some logic behind it.
Regarding pricing: It would potentially be way too complicated, but what I would love to see one day is a dynamic pricing model. Because usually airlines donāt really compete on the price, but rather on capacity. Meaning that airlines donāt decide on a certain price for a route, but rather an aircraft size they want to assign, and then they adjust the price dynamically to fill up the aircraft up to a certain seat load factor.
There used to be a tool called AirlineSim Enhancement Suite which was able to replicate this concept somewhat, although it took some weeks to adjust prices accordingly and follow the AGEX. Though from what Iāve heard, it was quite a strain on the servers. But itās basic idea to define a max-min price range and then let it work out the prices on itās own was the best simulation of actual airline pricing algorithms Iāve ever seen in an airline simulation game.
This should be less pronounced since a patch earlier this week. But preferred travel times are essentially random, so all else being equal, the bookings should spread fairly regularly, with occasional outliers due to larger reservation sizes (these are randomised as well and in rare cases you might receive a āgroup reservationā for 15 pax at once).
You will eventually be able to achieve this using booking classes and fare rules. With these features in place, you could create a relatively small booking class that only gets matched by a fare that is a.) cheap and b.) requires advanced booking. And the opposite, of course. Once nesting is implemented, you could even ensure that thereās always more capacity for the expensive fare until the physical capacity is reached.
Iāve read through this topic and I canāt see the answer to my question which is, have aircraft leases increased massively?
As an example, the lease deposit on a brand new A321NEO LIGHT on other servers is currently $2,176,150 whereas it seems to have jumped to $3,699,000 - which is quite considerable but a little strange as I got my 4 original aircraft at a rate of $2,176,150, exactly as I was expecting.