"Real life demand"

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According to the Handbook bit on creating routes, real life demand is depicted in the game.

Cultural ties and holiday destinations allegedly punch above their weight in terms of demand - has anyone actually noticed this in-game? On the flip side, are there any routes which should seem like they should get lots of traffic but don’t?

Finally, I noticed that it’s pretty easy to fill an ATR 72 within domestic routes, even if it’s a route between airports of only moderate demand (e.g. CBR to HBA, or ZQN to WLG). Meanwhile, I barely get any passengers on routes with high demand such as SYD to CGK (I found this out the hard way in the past and had to restart).

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It’s quite a complex topic, but I try to explain it understandable.

First of all: On which server are you playing? There are quite some important differences, especially with the introduction/test of the new demand distribution system.

You are right, real life demand data is used in the game with some exceptions and modifications. Important to consider here especially for holiday destinations is that charter flights are not considered. There is also no seasonality in the game which is important for major holiday destinations.

The modification of the real life demand is a bit harder to explain. The issue is that there are only demand data between to airport pairs available, not the real start and end airport of a passenger. So if you flight from Canberra to Hobart via Melbourne we don’t see this in the data, we just see that a passenger flew from CBR to MEL and from MEL to HBA.

To consider this the demand distribution is a bit adjusted within regions (political, cultural) - how exactly is a secret. But I try to illustrate it on the CBR to HBA example.

Let’s first look on Hobart. There is a huge demand for flights to MEL and SYD, decent to BNE, but that’s more or less it (beside some infrequent flights to few other airports). MEL on the other hand as major hub has frequent flights to a lot of domestic (and international) airports - also to CBR. The same is valid for SYD.

What now happens is that some of the real life demand between HBA and MEL is partially redistributed to the other destinations, so HBA to MEL and MEL to CBR demand is reduced, but HBA to CBR increased. Idea is to somehow simulate transferring passenger, though of course this approach can never perfectly simulate the reality. Also the entire topic is way more complex, but I hope you get the point.

Generally you can say that smaller airports that have only very few, frequent destinations (major hubs) in real life get because of the redistribution in the game way more destinations but with smaller demand. This should also encourage to create a hub and provide a lot of connections.

International flights like from SYD to CGK it get’s even more challenging. Not only because of the redistribution of demand, also because of increased competition on longer flights and how demand is distributed on the flights.

Beside the new game worlds Domination and Smiths, demand is distributed depending on the frequency times the rating with only a small penalty for transfer. So as longer the flight is as more competition you might have cause of of competition from other hubs with transfer flights. So if you compete with thousands of other flights, though these are transfer flights with lower rating, the sheer amount of flights makes it quite hard to fill the aircraft (so a working hub with connecting flights is a must)

Hope this helps you a bit to understand the challenges

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I’m playing on the Paine game world. I’m a relatively early adopter of that game world, so I guess I was able to benefit from the lack of competition for certain routes (or in some cases, a complete monopoly of flights to a certain airport).

As for international flights from SYD to CGK, there are competitors on that direct route. But are you saying that that I might need to also compete with passengers going on routings like SYD-DRW-CGK (with an Australian-based airline) or SYD-DPS-CGK (with an Indonesian-based airline)?

Also, do certain national agreements boost the number of flights between them? I find it easy to fill every flight from an Australian airport to AKL. Even my flights to WLG are almost full. Does the game boost traveller numbers between Australia and New Zealand to reflect reality?

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Pain game world is quite special as it’s an experimental game world changing new features and also have the new individual travel request feature.

I’m not sure if I understand your question correctly and/or you misunderstood me. There are two major components you have to consider, especially on international mid- & long haul flights:

  1. You not only compete with airlines on the same direct route as passenger in the game are also willing to transfer (that is simulated). The Pain game world introduced here a new calculation on which flight a passenger prefers to take. But in general longer flights means more competition through possible transfer flight connections. Transfers are possible and simulated if a route is not longer than 2.5x the direct flight (at least it was like this in the past), so to CGK you might even compete with airlines based in SIN, KUL or BKK for example. So a passenger might decide to transfer in Bangkok to flight to Indonesia (though the number might not be huge)
  2. On longer, international flights and to countries/regions with many airports the mentioned demand distribution usually has a bigger impact than domestic and/or short haul flights. So though in the real world there are (more or less) only flights from SYD to DPS and CGK in Indonesia, this demand is distributed also to other connections between the two countries that don’t exist in the real world. There might be even a demand of 1 or 2 passengers per day in game flying from NTL to KJT. So demand directly between the big hubs is reduced and redistributed a bit to other, smaller airports in the region or country. Having a good hub with good connections helps a lot to also get these passengers, IL agreements might also help.

I also don’t think that the demand between SYD and CGK is so huge. In Wikipedia it’s not even listed under the top 15 busiest international routes 2025 from SYD. According to flightradar24, this week there are in average 1.5 A330 scheduled. With typical configuration this might mean about 400 passengers daily in average.As you have competition you need to share this demand with your competitors. On the other hand you can get additional passengers by connecting other hubs like MEL or even smaller airports (as mentioned in point 2).

I guess now you should be able to explain why your flights to AKL to WLG are doing so well. First of all you might only compete with airlines based in Australia or New Zealand as other hubs are too far to compete. Second the are a lot of flights between Australia and New Zealand, especially SYD and AKL. There are even more flight from SYD to WLG as to CGK (though only narrow bodies are currently serving this route).

My recommendations to you:

  • Add flights to other Australian airports so passenger can transfer to your CGK flights (considering minimum/maximum transfer time and maximum distance/2.5x rule)
  • Focus at the beginning on domestic / short haul flights or flights to New Zealand. When you have a decent network expand to other countries/longer flights. If you have more experience you might also do differently, but as new player I don’t recommend it.
  • Wikipedia often has a list with the busiest domestic and international flights of an airport. This should give you at least an indication on the demand you might expect
  • On Flightradar24 you can see visually all connections of an airport of the next 7 days and also the frequency of it

Hope this helps you a little bit

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Advice taken. I will put more weighting on pre-existing real routes when deciding where to fly, instead of just the demand figures the game gives me.