Travel requests not only contain a desired departure date but also a return date. The Distribution System then generates a single booking with an outbound and an inbound segment. To make sure this makes sense, the “flight instancing window” must be extended to a longer timeframe (like two weeks). Otherwise it would be hard to generate sensible return connections.
Why?
It addresses a core issue of the current-generation ORS which always works in a single direction. Demand is the same in both directions, but the ORS can’t actually book “return traffic”. The DS will only book a return trip if it can find one (in accordance with all fare rules etc.).
The implications of this feature are quite far-reaching: Players will have to have even more foresight in their strategy as flights would be made available for booking around two weeks into the future, making ad hoc changes potentially costly.
Addendum: With the timeframe expanded to such a long time, this feature also allows to introduce “time-sensitive passengers” in a sensible manner, meaning the time in the day a flight leaves or arrives matters to them.
Martin, do you have stats on what percentage are one way bookings vs return bookings in real life? As far as I understand people nowadays frequently book one way tickets and combine different airlines, depending on time of day and other factors, stopovers, etc. Most airlines don’t offer special pricing for return trips, w.g. return trip is a sum of two one way fares.
How would this be implemented, what portion would be return bookings and what portion would be one way bookings ?
Day and night difference And I figure it will be same for most network carriers.
But about the general question: One has to differentiate between return trips and return bookings. Currently, the assumption is that every trip is a return trip…people will eventually want to return. True one-way trips are likely the exception in the real world, too. So the DS will always generate return requests, at least initially.
Now whether those trips are actually booked as a return is a different story and depends on a bunch of other features, like Distribution Channels or Passenger Service Systems. What you describe is people building their own itineraries instead of booking a complete trip on a single ticket via a travel agent or an airline directly. In technical terms, this would mean that AirlineSim would essentially have to allow any and all connections, at least for certain passenger types or booking requests. For the same reasons we’ve always been limiting transfers in AS, I could imagine that this would be technically unfeasible, as the possible permutations would just be too many.