Seats and In-Flight-Services - Some issues

English Boards Suggestions and Ideas
21

George, I think in the real world no one is going to pay for 200% price in order to get a good seat for economy class. People will book your ticket if you charge low with great service, but not pay too much for better service. If they really want to get better service, they will consider paying for a standard priced business/first class seat before paying their economy seat at 200% price. That's the reason even a lot of Japnese fly with Delta on pacific routes because Delta has a lower price. Of course, it won't be ANA or JAL service, but people in the real world think about the price a lot, especially when the price for a standard ANA/JAL economy seat is even higher than that for a Delta economy comfort seat.

The cap is still too high for economy class. I think 150% might be more reasonable. Maybe even less for short haul. AS is also missing economy comfort class at this point.  That's when people want to get a better seat but unable to pay for the business class tickets. 

22

There is a cap.

That cap is 200%.

You can put a full bed in economy and still charge a maximum of 200% of default price, even though by the linear relationship you should be able to sell it to value oriented passengers for 300% of the default.

Or you can put lie flat 160 or full bed, or luxury suite in business, yet still charge only the same 200% on all of them.

So the cap exists and is set.

Thanks, I didn't know that. The main point remains, however, that ridiculously good seats will still get a much higher rating than "standard" seats, even though real-life economy passengers don't care about the seat so long as it isn't really awful. Economy isn't about value, it's about being cheap - even legacy carriers are going for a condensed configuration now. People may pay a little extra to not get shoved into a tincan, but that's it, there's no way economy passengers will pay twice the price for a better seat on a 3h trip.  We might, but as I've been pointing over and over, we're aviation "weirdos", the bulk of passengers is not.

23

Hi,

as George has said already, price sensitive passengers would cause a race to the bottom.

Our virtual passengers don't "fly the flag", they are not tempted by flight attendants in short skirts, nor by good marketing. Even if our passengers value price only a little more than the other factors, the guy with the lower price will get the passengers. Period. That will force others to lower their price if they want to keep their share of the passengers, and so on. After two months, we shall all be operating low cost carriers and go bankrupt anyway.

Price sensitive passengers will only work if they become an extra type of passenger. And then the players who like to spiral down, can enter that market  ;-)

Jan

24

This is clearly a discussion for the future performance system. But, I think it should be possible to have demand curves for different classes of passengers. For example:

D = f(aQ * bP)

Where D is demand, Q is quality of service (made up of seat, service, aircraft quality, as well as maybe total duration and any penalty for connecting - or you could split duration out into a separate category for time-sensitive pax), and P is price.

That way, players could target different market segments, as well as stimulating demand up to a certain point by lowering prices (would primarily attract price-sensitive pax), increasing quality (e.g. getting a few elite flyers to leave their corporate jet at home) or establishing direct routes (picking up more time-sensitive pax).

25

Hi sorry to bump up this thread but i couldnt help but notice this, being a new player.

So if I understand the simulation correctly, there is only one type of passenger per booking class: passengers that book C, passengers that book F and passengers that book Y?

And within these classes, there is no diversifaction? So within the Y bucket, all passengers going from A to B will choose the highest rating available flight? And of course the price is a factor in the rating, but in practice offering full service still works way better than poor service plus rock bottom fares.

I belive that this simulation is a bit too simple, and I also believe that it shouldnt make things MUCH more complex if it were spiced up a little. Because you have different kinds of Y pax; those who go for the rock bottom fares hands down, those who do want to go mainline and have some comfort but not pay too much, those willing to pay a bit more, bordering to a Y+ product, those who don't care how long the journey is and those who do, etc. Now I understand that this would be too much. However you could spice up the model a bit to kind of reflect this without going too far.

I will do a couple of suggestions:

1. Have some kind f wealth demographic for each airport (wealth is much higher in Oslo than in Mexico City, for example) and by extension for each passenger. Wealthier pasengers will value service more than price, even in Y, than poorer passengers.

2. Have Leisure and Business travelers. Leisure travellers will care less about transfers, quality etc. while business travellers will care much more about htat. And LCY will generate much more travellers of the Business type than of the Leisure type, while in PMI this is reverse, etc.

Is this SO INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT to model in? The player doesn't even need to see these statistics, they could be hidden for extra fun. All it would do is kind of alter the demand the passenger has to produce a perfect rating.

26

nah, it’s totally easy and all the information has been gathered years ago. they just don’t like us, the customera, so they rather offer poor service plus rock bottom fares

27

nah, it's totally easy and all the information has been gathered years ago. they just don't like us, the customera, so they rather offer poor service plus rock bottom fares

Is every suggestion met with snide sarcasm here?

28

Actually, from what I've heard a revised passenger demand system is planned somewhere in the future that will do exactly that: generate different types of passengers in, say, the "economy" branch: those who go for the cheapest price available, those who are willing to pay a bit more for comfort but not much, etc.

That said,

So within the Y bucket, all passengers going from A to B will choose the highest rating available flight? And of course the price is a factor in the rating, but in practice offering full service still works way better than poor service plus rock bottom fares.

This is not true. If one flight has an ORS rating of 99 and another of 98, the first will get more passengers to book it, but not a lot more. You won't get all passengers automatically booking the highest rated flight. The one with a rating of 70 will get a much lower booking ratio, however.

29

Is every suggestion met with snide sarcasm here?

only those discussed a trillion times

30

only those discussed a trillion times

As I mentioned in my post, I am new here. How would I be supposed to know? Not very friendy to newcomers here...

In any case I am excited that this is already being worked on.

31

in that case: welcome to airlinesim and the msg board.

and as a hint for the future: there is a search bar in the upper right corner of the msg board

32

Something else that could be added: Buy on Board services. If I understand it right, if I don't give my Y pax a sandwich they will be starving throughout the entire flight and I won't get revenue from pax buying the sandwich. BoB is a key concept that make many carriers around the real world survive; something like RyanAir would go bankrupt wtihout it. The penalty would be, of course, a lower ORS rating if you don't get stuff for free (because even in the real world, people love 'free stuff' even if it's in their ticket price; however BOB and lower fares attract a different market).

Even a simple game such as airline empires has buy on board. Why can't we? And for the many aviation geeks who absolutely loathe low cost carriers for some reason: you can buy stuff on board most mainline carriers as well.

Now baggage handling is not yet implemented in the game of course and that would open a whole new can of worms but it would be nice to have options for complimentary or baggage for a fee if that is ever implemented.