Seats not filling

English Boards Community Support
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Im currently having problems filling my aircraft. As you can see from the picture included most are only booked for around 50%. There are no restrictions either end for my DH8-Q400. My ticket prices are -5% the route default, my service profile is an ok rating and the seats are the same. What am I doing wrong?

Is it just because the airline has only been open 3 or 4 days?

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How many booking cycles (“days”) have you been waiting? If that’s just the first go: Seats are booked up to three days in advance, so you may fill your planes at a later stage.

Moreover: You should really have your planes do more than four rotations a day.

Just as a quick hint (you should be Aurora Wings, right?): Try a shuttle to Dublin, keep in mind the minimum connection time at ORK (60 minutes) and generate some transfer passengers to fill your planes to AMS.

Good luck!

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Hey, noob. :D

You don’t do anything wrong but it’s the route which doesn’t have sooo much demand. But anyway. Those bookings are ok - you should be likely in “plus” with Dash 8.

@plotz - The flights are already running … so at least he waited 4 days… :)

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Sounds like I need to learn more and understand the benefits of connections then :) to the wiki! You say my aircraft should have more than 4 rotations does that mean i should have on aircraft per route in order to have this amount?

EDIT: there is not much info on the wiki in relation to connections :confused:

5

Okay… a brief introduction:

In case your Hub states connection time "60 minutes" (as an example), you can transfer passengers from one flight to another.

Atm, you’re maybe serving flights from AMS to ORK and from ORK to DUB.

Now there are two possibilities for you to generate connections:

a) The same plane serves AMS-ORK, then goes on with ORK-DUB. No minimum waiting time exists, as passengers can just reboard the same plane and travel on (also goes for airports that state "connections impossible").

B) Different planes arrive from AMS, DUB, LHR, CDG etc. - roughly at the same time - and depart at least sixty minutes later (if that’s your minimum connection time). Passengers will now happily swap planes and board them to whereever they like to go. ORK is just a five-bar-airport, meaning demand for passengers treating ORK as their final destination is limited. If you maintain a competitive price/service relation and offer reasonable journey durations to other destinations, you should be able to generate connecting passengers really fast.

Rotations: The maintenance ratio of your Q400 is far above 100%, I guess. This means, you still have some time left you can use to assign your plane more flights. Try DUB, you’ll be surprised! ;)

Further advice: Have you ever used the Online Reservation System? Just try a few connections to grasp what I just tried to explain :) .

Moreover: There’s a performance tool for every aircraft. In your flight assignment, a turnaround time is already included in the big green block. You can deduct turnaround to see how long you’d have to have your planes wait to get to your minimum connection time between two flights. You may only have to leave a 15-minute blank in your flight plan.

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So should I leave my aircraft on the ground for 60 minutes or have some departing every 30 or something?

I still cant understand this XD facepalm

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OK, I’ll try a bit more hands-on:

[b]Here are your flights (imagine!):

[/b]

#1 AMS-ORK arriving 13:30 LT (plane #1), turnaround for e.g. a Q400 @ ORK is 20 minutes, so it’s ready for the next departure at 13:50LT [that’s the end of the green box in the flight planning menu]

#2 DUB-ORK arriving 13:30 LT (plane #2)

Transfer time in ORK is 60 minutes.

If your next flights are arranged like this…

[i]#3 ORK-AMS leaving 14:30 LT (plane #2)

#4 ORK-DUB leaving 14:30 LT (plane #1)[/i]

… passengers originating from AMS with DUB as their final destination will be able to e.g. deboard plane #2, take a stroll around the terminal and be at their connecting gate in time to board plane #1 for their next flight to DUB. That way, your flight from AMS can sell seats to passengers willing to travel to ORK and to DUB, as well!

Maximum connecting time btw. is 8 hours, so if a gap between two flights is longer than that, the Online Reservation System will not allow passengers to book tickets for this journey.

[b]Example for a pattern that does NOT work for you:

[/b]

#3 ORK-AMS leaving 14:29 LT (plane #2) --> 59 minutes since the passengers’ arrival have passed. They arrive at the gate just as the door of your shiny Q400 is closed and pushback is initiated :P .

[b]Special case:

[/b]

Plane #1 serves the following pattern:

[i]#1 AMS-ORK arriving 13:30 LT (plane #1)

#4 ORK-DUB leaving 13:50 LT (plane #1)[/i]

Since your happy travelling folks don’t even have to deboard the plane, they just sit back, relax and travel on to DUB.

Were you able to understand me now? :)

8

Here goes, Hubwaves 101…

Let’s start with defining a few things:

Minimum transfer time is 60 minutes

Turnaround time of all your aircraft is 45 minutes

If you now have a bunch of flights inbound to your hub, landing at 12:05, 12:09, 12:12 and 12:15 (for instance), then the earliest departure you want to plan is at 13:16. Why? Because that way, the last arriving flight will still have a possibility of having passengers transfer to all departing flights. You take an extra minute for safety because the arrival time is rounded. It might be 12:15:29, which is rounded to 12:15. A departure at 13:15 would not fulfil the 60 minute transfer window, so transfers wouldn’t be possible. There is one exception, as plotz said, namely if passengers transfer from a flight on aircraft A to a second flight also on aircraft A, then the minimum transfer time does not apply.

Now, I defined turnaround time, and for good reason: When scheduling a flight on your aircraft, you’ll see the yellow (and later green/brown) blocks appear on the schedule. The time at the right hand side of these blocks is the ‘ready for departure’ time. This is the actual time at which you could send the aircraft flying again. For our example aircraft, this means the 12:05 arrival will be available for flights at 12:50. But since we want to make sure there are transfers to other flights we operate, we need to wait with our next departure until 13:16, as stated above. This means the aircraft has a small gap between the two flights.

Now, since we’re planning with this 1-hour gap, and doing so quite tightly, it’s very well possible that slots will become an issue. For that reason, I suggest adding some more time to a transfer time window. I operate from AMS, where the minimum transfer time is 1h30. My departure wave leaves 2 hours after my arrival wave. This allows me to schedule arrivals up to 30 (29, rounding issue) minutes after the target arrival wave, without losing connections. Or alternatively, it allows to pull some flights forward for those same 30 (29) minutes without losing the connections from my arrival wave.

Of course this sort of strategy is invariably going to leave some dead time on your schedule. My 737-fleet only operates 3 return flights per day. If operating back to back, I could operate 4 per day, with a potential 5th on 4-5 weekdays. Doing so, however, means I sacrifice a streamlined hub system completely geared towards generating connecting passengers.

However, there are also players who have created a sort of hybrid. They make each aircraft conform to a single hub wave, and then plan back-to-back flights after that to use the schedule more efficiently. It reduces time-on-ground, but also reduces the connection potential for the remaining flights.

And, on the note of connecting passengers, there’s one more thing I should note: Passengers can connect from any one flight to any other flight (provided an airline has transferring enabled, and/or an interlining agreement is active) only within a certain window. The window opens after the minimum transfer time (arrival + 60 minutes in our example) and ends 8 hours after arrival (15h in the case of the Devau game world). Any flights departing within that window are eligible for connecting passengers (see conditions earlier in this paragraph), so a hybrid schedule may still generate transfers, but the transfer time will average more around 5-6 hours for those flights.

Well, I hope that’s enough information for the moment, and that it helped you a bit. If not, let me/us know, I may be able to clarify what I wrote here with some screen shots if necessary.

edit: plotz’ post is probably a little more useful, though I hope the insight in additional scheduling strategies as well as their advantages and disadvantages is helpful.

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Sounds like its very time inefficient :confused:

Do people wait in the terminal for more tham the alloted min connection time?

what happens when you have more than 2 aircraft, It sounds like a lot of work to get connecting PAX

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Read both Tim’s and my post again - yes, they do. Up to the max. of 8 hours after their last flight’s landing. :)

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So im pretty sure i understand connections now, and I realise it is a relatively simple process facepalm

Ive figured (what i think and understand) to be the most efficient way to do this. My main flight (i reset to experiment more with connections) from ORK-ATL departs at 12:00AM and i have a smaller aircraft running to airports without connections to US all arriving in Cork between 03:00 and 11:00. All of the flights on the E175 depart on the closest half an hour mark i.e ORK-DUB@ 03.30 and ORK-BRU@ 6:30. If I continue to add aircraft with schedules departing from Cork at 30 minute intervals one hour after the last flight arrives I should maximise connections?

I probably shouldnt risk a long haul flight though :P

I should start again with a few q400’s

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Look at the attached screenshot, I hope you can decipher what planning I use. This is how you can maximize connections in your network, with all flights arriving at the same time, waiting the minimum transfer time (+ small buffer), then departing all at the same time again. That way, everything can connect to everything. If I were to just keep the minimum transfer time between two flights on the same aircraft, and my next aircraft would arrive 5 minutes later, passengers couldn’t transfer anymore. That’s why you want to aim for arrivals and departures at set times, rather than a staggered interval like I think you have in mind. Again, see my screenshot, it’s part of my Ops Control and shows you part of my schedule for 24 hours. 3 hub waves should be clearly visible.

1 Like
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I,m having a similar problem to Connor . I activated all my schedules 2 days ago and it;s past the ticket allocation time for my chosen airport ( Mumbai ) but i still have 0 % booking and my flights aren’t showing up on the scheduled flights board or the departure board for mumbai

additionally my rating are on the higher side and my ticket prices are only slightly more than default

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What’s your holding’s location? If it’s in neither of the two countries between which the flight takes place, you don’t have traffic rights and won’t get bookings for your flight (other than cargo). If your holding is in one of the countries, then just give it some time for the booking process to be repeated. You’ll get a total of 3 runs, meaning there may still be bookings on the next run.

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Mumbai-Karachi and my seats from mumbai-pune/nagpur/jaipur aren’t filling either and why do some flights charging over 100$ over default get sold out wheras the flights charging default don’t

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Quick Question regarding Turn Times. The Arrival Time is the time that is used for connecting passengers correct since at my hub St. Louis it is a 90 minute connection. So I’d base Departure times off the arrival correct?

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They;re not filling for me either. Can anyone give me specific tips for my routes? I’m losing a TON of money every day. Thanks to anyone for the help!

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N003WAA Fornebu AirlineSim.htm

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N004WAA Fornebu AirlineSim.htm
They’re not filling for me either.

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southwest operations control.htm

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N002WAA Fornebu AirlineSim.htm

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N001WAA Fornebu AirlineSim.htm

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Oops looks like this might work better.

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You’re operating some pretty old and/or unpopular aircraft. If you’re up against a lot of competition, which chances are you are, then these planes won’t fill. I’d suggest you start over using more modern aircraft. Just lease-order a few 737s or A319s to start out with. Or perhaps a bunch of Dash8-400s if you prefer smaller aircraft to fly more routes.

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K I restarted the airline. I got a 737-600 BGW, 2 A318’s and a Dash8. My flights are filling up a little faster but not by much. Do I have to manually set up transfer flights if it’s in the 1:30-8 hr. transfer time window in Denver or is it automatic?

Also should I limit the amount of flights per day to each destination and open up more offices around the Country and schedule more diverse locations for my flights? I have 3 or 4 airports I usually fly back and fourth to between the aircraft’s and I would think this would be good because I have a lot of flights at different times from these locations that people can transfer to throughout the day. I’m flying back and fourth from Denver between Las Vegas McCarran, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles and have a few flights to Phoenix, Dallas/Fort Worth and Seattle/Tacoma. Should I fly to more destinations or keep my routes focused more on connecting throughout these airports every few hours?

EDIT: My seats have only filled 0-19% from the airports that have their demand calculated. Is this normal? The 19% is only from my dash8 too. The most I’ve got on a larger aircraft is 17/106 (16%). Is this normal the day of opening up shop or do you usually fill up the first day or two after you schedule your flights?