ITRs have been active in Paine for quite some time now. As expected, there still quite a few things about them that aren’t perfect. Some of those issues are simply missing but planned modifications or features (see overview). Others are balancing problems that require fiddling with the system’s parameters.
Especially the latter is what I am interested in right now. As I’d like to broaden the ITR trial (potentially with a new temporary game world), I’d like to know which issues you think are the most pressing at the moment.
I have a few items on my list already, but I’d like to hear your perspective as actual players.
First I have to say I love this feature as it basically enables different business models and allow airlines to “choose” their target customers and much broader range of strategies.
The most painful point I have encountered is the imbalance of passengers on two directions of the same route. I’m sure that the dev team is aware of this (it’s already listed as a known issue), but it’s actually much worse than one might think: on some routes I have to introduce a ~10% price difference between outbound and inbound to maintain the same load factor, and on some other routes the outbound flight has much more business customers than economy ones, or the other way around. This actually has made pricing and cabin layout planning very difficult, and in my point of view is not quite realistic: in real world, most passengers, although not all, fly round trips: they return to where they started eventually.
Still, have to say I love this much more than the old model. Hope this imbalance issue can be addressed soon!
Little different perspective from me, I don’t have a lot of time to play so after 3-4 restarts I gave up for now after not figuring out a profitable system.
For me the biggest problem is the outdated ORS, service profile info, etc. that is still displayed (but says it has no meaningful effect) so I’m basically guessing for everything.
sometimes bad/outdated info is worse or more confusing than no info at all.
After a 2-3 failed attempts over the past six months, I’m now closing my second week of profitability in a major market with a unique strategy that would never work in a traditional server. I have much optimism for ITRs, but do not have the experience to provide valuable feedback. As a new player, I can currently relate to Loge’s feeling of being pretty blind.
Huh, I expected this to be an issue (hence the item on the list of known issues) but can’t remember anyone actually mentioning it before. So thanks, good to know
Do others share this experience?
Either way: It was the hardest nut to crack for the Technology Demonstrator and I might never find a satisfactory solution for the current generation of AirlineSim. But I haven’t really looked into it in detail yet. The root issue is that for each and every pair of origin and destination, AirlineSim would have to generate all connections in both directions either at the same time (massive performance impact) or log requests and bookings for the return direction (far from perfect solution). Maybe there’s something in between, but it’s a topic for research once I’ve got a few brain cycles to spare
I agree on all mentioned issues. Imbalance on some routes seems odd, although until now I had no clue why that is. An idea for how to make it feasible: the ITR should use a 50/50 distribution for a route: Lets say LHR-LOS. 50% PAX are willing to pay more, as LHR is financially strong, while 50% are at the lower end for LOS. Still, it means double the calulations for the system… As on all servers, since that is an ongoing general issue, its far to easy to make profits. We talked about that 4U airline in Europe, we talked about too low fares on TATL routes. As long as margins are as high as they are, there will always be players that just massively dump on some routes, because they can still make good money elsewhere. Id also refer to fuel prices at this point: they should be unfiltered / undampened, mostly because it forces airlines to react instead of just keeping everything as is, sacrificing a very few % margin.
Off topic here but as an airline with almost 1000 aircrafts (not Paine), some features need to become available before cancelling the damper, e.g., pause of flights (possibly by batch) and tempory disable maintenance of certain aircrafts (to temporily cease fuel guzzlers and get fuel efficient aircrafts while avoiding 15% extra maintenance). I consider myself as a fast scheduler but the fastest I can do is to schedule 30 narrow body in 1 hour without thinking too much, and that means you need 33 hours minimum if you have to touch 1000 aircrafts, not to say some airlines have way more (and some at multiple servers)
Yes. Not totally unrelated though, as it is about balancing demand and profitability. Tbh a more forward looking fleet management would prevent such issues like the one you’re mentioning, with managing a huge fleet, but also make it harder to dump prices as its done right now due to the ITR being so extremely price sensitive.
I think, as others have mentioned, the ITR structure is probably a little too price sensitive. The outcome is (certainly in Paine), great difficulty operating ATR types when competition wander in with hyper-efficient jets and dump prices.
I get this is all part of the game, but reality would suggest passengers aren’t truly this price sensitive - otherwise the likes of Loganair, Emerald, Aurigny etc wouldn’t exist as all pax would just shun their higher fares and go for easyjet etc (who compete on many core routes).
In the game, its quite mad how much difference just $2-3 on a fare can be - quite literally the difference between 20% economy LF and 100% LF in some cases.
I also think, in Europe anyway, economy demand is too low and business demand a little too high. Most EU carriers offer next to no business provision and almost all of them are pure economy. In Paine, my business fills easily, well before economy, and I offer a great economy product compared to real world.
Yes, I am almost certainly going to fiddle with the prise sensitivity knobs over the coming weeks.
These two points - big impact of small price changes and seemingly low economy demand - are likely related. Not mentioned on this thread, but elsewhere: For some reason, economy capacities in Paine are much higher than demand. One would think that by now, people would have adjusted. But apparently, many players are enjoying to finally play an LCC (of sorts)
I also suffer from the imbalance of pax demand and I think it might be useful to know what the competitors are offering (ex. catering, seat type, etc), much like Expedia or any other online booking agent. I also find that most economy passengers act like business class passengers and avoid my low-cost option and instead choose the higher priced option
not at the moment because my airline flys routes that have zero competition, but on a previous stint, I had competition on the CJU-FUK route, I was priced about 3% lower than the competitor, but I was never able to get above a 10% load.
A 10% load looks like there was fierce competition, so all sorts of other factors will likely have played a role here as well, like preferred travel date etc.
This is almost certainly because those passengers are taking you competitor’s connections. I’d guess such competitors are large carriers and they don’t interline with you. In that case when you see that their flights are full, most of those passengers’ destinations are not that one flight’s destination.
When your airline get bigger you’ll see the power of transferring
I’ve had the total opposite. Y pax love low fares and aren’t prepared to pay even $1-2 more (no matter how glamourous your cabin). This even applies for routes where I have no competition. The lower the fare, the more demand and more full the aircraft!
