As the title says: Replace the current service profiles with a better, modernised and more sensible feature. This replacement could (and should?) potentially look very different from what we have today, capturing more “tangible product aspects” beyond mere “catering”. What exactly this might entail is completely open, though. So looking forward to input!
Why?
The current feature is woefully outdated, even laughably so. It’s also tedious to use and is based on technology we are about to phase out. So a replacement needs to be found.
To enable low cost carriers there would have to be options for customers to purchase upgrades to the base set of services included with the fare.
For example to enable wifi, or make the wifi faster. Biscuits and coffee are free, but you can pay for a sandwich. Unlock the IFE, etc.
I’m not sure how you would calculate what percentage of customers purchase these upgrades. Perhaps they are more included in purchase if there was no full service airline on the route, less inclined to purchase items on shorter flights, etc.
Perhaps to offer hot food, ovens need to be installed as part of the cabin configuration. If you’ve got an A380, you could install a shower!
Ideally these new options would be linked with the booking classes feature so you could have a mix of full service and low cost customers on the same flight.
Would ground/airport services be included in this feature, or should that be a separate one?
I’m thinking about things like:
Fast track through security and/or customs
Business/First lounges at the airport before departure on on arrival
Concierge / fast transfer service at the hub when on a connecting flight
Perhaps there would be a dependency on these facilities being available at the terminal. The airline that owns the terminal would have to pay ongoing costs on these facilities, but could offer them out to other airlines for a fee.
Ancilliary services are definitely something we have to add eventually. They fall into quite different categories, though, and might have considerable impact beyond just revenue. A few examples that come to mind:
If you offer something like “free seat choice” or “priority boarding”, this sort of implies that there’s a boarding system in place. And boarding systems might have an impact on turnaround times.
Similarly, hand luggage allowance has a direct impact on boarding speed in practice. Combined with Baggage Fare Rules, there might be interesting interdependencies. Incentivise fewer checked bags, and people might bring more hand luggage and vice versa.
Obviously, anything that depends on aircraft equipment (like IFE, internet) might be unavailable due to the aircraft that day not having the respective hardware (or a technical issue), so when it’s been offered when the flight was booked (maybe even for free) but then it wasn’t available when the passenger took the flight, this might have a negative impact on image. Although I figure we might be in “rounding-error territory” here
Individual Travel Request Generation has been conceived for this very reason. We can basically roll any customer attributes we like when a request is generated.
I like this idea.
Not booking classes per se, but rather Fares. The more I think about it, I figure service profiles will be a sort of extension to fares/fare rules. So for each fare, you’d specify which “type” it is. Here’s a random example of what this looks like for Lufthansa:
It’s three times the same booking class, but three different fares. Everything in the table down to and including “Refundability” is “classic fare rules”. Everything below is “fare type”… something the airline broadly defines across the whole business or for particular markets (domestic, international, …).
I think they should definitely be part of this, albeit as potentially separate features (think lounges…we need lounges in the game first, something that’s probably not al that trivial to add).
Don’t different fares usually translate into different booking classes? For example I found this list for United Economy:
Highest full fare: Y.
Full fare: B.
High fare: M, E, H, U.
Discounted fare: Q, V, W.
Deep-discounted fare: L, K, S, T.
Lowest discounted fare: G.
Basic economy: N (on domestic flights).
These often impact frequent flyer behavior, as the different classes earn points at different rates (or not at all), but that is probably a whole other feature idea
Booking classes represent the inventory. So to stick with your United example: On a domestic flight, United would split the actual Economy cabin into 15 virtual ones. Each of those would get a different size based on whatever level of demand United predicts for a given day. Then each of these gets sold via different fares (hence them occasionally being called “fare buckets”). Buckets for lower fares would typically be smaller (they sell out faster) and they would also be “nested” within the higher ones, so if more capacity of a higher fare is sold, it’ll cut into the inventory of lower fares. On top of that, the airline’s revenue management system would decide when certain booking classes are opened and closed.
But at the end of the day, it’s the fares that determine the price and the rules. In my LH example above, all 4 fares are available for booking class Z. To illustrate, I just had another look at a flight from FRA to DEN (same date, same search result, just different connections):
Booking class Z:
Booking class D:
Booking class C:
So in LH’s terms, there are 3 general Business fare types…Basic, Basic Plus and Flex. And the latter will always be more expensive than the former. But the overall price level is determined by what inventory is still available/open for booking. Technically, my example amounts to a total of 9 fares. Three for each booking code.
With a pattern like Unite’s (or any network carrier’s) in place, where certain codes are always used for high/full/discounted fares, it also makes sense to use those as the basis for points/miles in frequent flyer programs. And yes…those would definitely be a separate roadmap item
After I typed all this, I realised a glossary might be needed (which I should probably add to the handbook eventually). And I need to put back into perspective how this relates to AirlineSim and the subject of this topic: Service Profiles.
In AS (as in reality), players will deal with the following:
Bookings Codes: One-letter codes to denote the booking class.
Inventory: The overall capacity offered.
Service Class: The general class of service…Economy, Business, First etc.
Cabins: The physical aircraft capacities. Often aligned with the service class, but not always (for example eco/business in a single cabin or different cabins for “regular first” and “first suites”).
Booking classes: The virtual classes the physical cabins are divided into and that make up the inventory.
Fares: The price offered between two markets. Always refers to a booking code.
Routing rules: Rules used to decide which routings a fare is applicable to. One might specify that a fare only applies to non-stop connections or that a connection has to go via a specific airport.
Fare rules: Additional rules that determine the conditions under which a fare is available…days of the week, length of stay, advance booking period, change/refund conditions, discounts for children/groups etc.
Somewhere in the list above, the concept of “service profiles” needs to fit in. And right now I feel like the idea of fare types suits this the best: Players will define and manage hundreds or even thousands of fares, but these will typically fall into a much smaller set of categories that define service attributes not covered by fares/fare rules. So whenever a player defines a fare, they’ll like do this from a template of some sort and they’ll be able to specify the general type of the fare so the service attributes are always the same.
Instead of configuring service profile for individual routes, I believe it make more sense for entire airlines to have 1 single service profile (or at least for 1 route group), and then within the single service profile, user can customize the condition of when a flight get better services (e.g. hot meal, or second meal in the flight) based on conditions like distance/flight time of the aircraft, domestic/international, etc.
