Little Revenue

H​ello everybody,

​I've a little problem.

I've leased 2 Bombardier Dash8-Q400B, they are 5 years old.

Well, they are full booked but their revenue are less than the other planes half booked. (The other planes are 2 B757-200ER winglets and 3 Bombardier CRJ 900LR)

A full booked Q400B makes me only about 2000 AS$, while an half booked CRJ makes me 2500 AS$. (CRJ makes longer flight than Q400)

How is it possible??

I thought about my onboard services but I spent 4.50 AS$ for economy class and 24 AS$ for Business class. (No first class and cargo)

My current maintenance contractor is Helvetic Maintenance.

Price are 95%.

Do revenues depends by the distance traveled by the planes?

Do the plane model influence the revenue?

Thank you so much!

PS I'm sorry for possible english mistakes because I'm not an english native.

Revenue doesn't depend on the flight length, but it definitely depends on the model. Some players will even tell you don't use ER or LR model unless you need to because of the extra cost generated by the aircraft type. 

Booking condition is not the only thing affects your profit, leasing cost, maintenance, fuel economy, and a lot of factors contribute to your profit per flight. Some of the ultra-short haul might be unprofitable for most of models under fully booked condition with default price. Check the flight info page, and you will see how the profit was calculated for that flight. 

Actually the flight length affects your revenue. The longer the flight, the higher the default thrice for economy, business, first class ticket and cargo unit.

Absolutely speaking, if you have a 500 km flight on CRJ and 1000 km flight on CRJ, the longer flight will get you much higher revenue than the first one, given the same number of passengers booked between the economy and business class.

You can check the possible revenue in machine evaluation tool for each route. Then you can compare different models.

I know George, but it will be a more pricing factor than the flight length itself. You will run more short flights than long flights on one aircraft per day. Can't really compare this per flight, need to compare by day or even by week.

So, remember that actually there are a couple of different things going on here that can swing the balance one way or another;

- Ticket price increases with stage length. Simple enough; you fly further, you get more dolla. But...

- Ticket price per unit of distance decreases with stage length; relatively speaking, if you had a full, spherical aircraft in a vacuum you'd make more dolla flying it between close points multiple times per day. However:

- Aircraft flying around all day don't take much maintenance; landing them is a lot more forceful and is where things tend to break. So - shorter stages = more landings = more maintenance costs per distance.

- Each takeoff implies a new set of per-passenger costs - catering, handling etc - so your non-maintenance expenses are higher too;

- Turnaround times are a thing; if you're flying between two tiny little airports they're not really much of an issue, but when you start to involve larger airports, each landing can be one to several hours on the ground waiting for things to happen - that's an hour your fancy airyplane isn't making any money, which doesn't necessarily matter too much if you're running a bunch of old aircraft but is a killer if you're paying high leasing rates and need to pay for those before you pay for anything else;

** The end result is that longer flights actually earn you less raw income (which people miss, I think), but cost less to run by more than the difference, so tend to be more profitable.

e: this under the old pricing system, anyway. iirc some of the newer servers have a different one where incomes are weighted more towards long distances, so it's even more of a thing on those.

Thanks everybody for the replies! ​

So if i wanna do a ultra-short haul flight I'll buy a specific aircraft, right?

Well, yes and no. If you are going to fly under 500 km routes, a CR9 or Q400 might be the best bet. But there are times when you schedule USH route even on A321 if you need capacity (connection to a slot restricted airport) or use up available time on aircraft's schedule.

On a trunk route, you can also fly with A330 or even bigger. It depends on the demand on that route.

And please don't buy but lease planes...