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).