Does anybody else feel, that the seat ratings are a bit off in AS ?
In Economy, you need to install comfort/comfort+ seats in order to remain competetive. In real life most carriers install standard seats, maybe something like leisure/leisure+ on the better carries and Comfort/Comfort+ in premium economy only (whatever the carriers call it these days).
Then in business, you can get away with lie flat 140/160 seats to quite a distance in Long Haul. Where as in reality nobody accepts anything less than lie-flat in Long Haul business these days (I suppose that would equal the much disliked BA offering today), and some carriers are more into different types of open suite installations in various configurations. In AS Open Suite translates into 1+2+1 config which is what most better LH carriers offer today as their business class product.
I do understand that there needs to be dissimilarities to real life in order to be able to differentiate offering as things like brand loyalty are not modelled. But let's face it, in real life the airlines compete with seats in their business class offering. In economy they compete with price and to a certain extent service . Less so with the seats.
If the seat requirements better reflected reality, we would be able to configure the planes more like they are configured in real life. Maybe when things like Economy Comfort get introduced into AS the seats could be revised as well ? Like make the economy what it really is,
Well, to me there are a few more things lacking with the seating. For example for business and first class seating there is no possibility to use "Herringbone seating" to optimise the floor space available to fit in more seats. It's a practise seen more often nowadays and would especially be useful on some very wide aircraft where open suites in 1+2+1 configuration leave 2 huge aisles.
And that the AirlineSim passenger, especially the economy passenger, is focused too much on quality relative to price is something that has been discussed on the forum for years and I wait till the update with new passenger types and other things to see how that changes the booking behaviour. Maybe that update solves a part of the problem with the seating.
There won’t be an update before the whole pricing gets reformed, there ist still a huge update in planning/progress which redesigns the prices. So that you can set other prices for a direct flying passengers and transit passengers
Everything you said makes sense, but I have seen people purchase paid J in RSH-esque seats (USA domestic F) transcon (e.g. LAX-IAD) for prices higher than similar-distance lie-flat products (LAX-FLL on B6 Mint). Real life revenue management is confusing too!
Does anybody else feel, that the seat ratings are a bit off in AS ?
In Economy, you need to install comfort/comfort+ seats in order to remain competetive. In real life most carriers install standard seats, maybe something like leisure/leisure+ on the better carries and Comfort/Comfort+ in premium economy only (whatever the carriers call it these days).
Then in business, you can get away with lie flat 140/160 seats to quite a distance in Long Haul. Where as in reality nobody accepts anything less than lie-flat in Long Haul business these days (I suppose that would equal the much disliked BA offering today), and some carriers are more into different types of open suite installations in various configurations. In AS Open Suite translates into 1+2+1 config which is what most better LH carriers offer today as their business class product.
I do understand that there needs to be dissimilarities to real life in order to be able to differentiate offering as things like brand loyalty are not modelled. But let's face it, in real life the airlines compete with seats in their business class offering. In economy they compete with price and to a certain extent service . Less so with the seats.
If the seat requirements better reflected reality, we would be able to configure the planes more like they are configured in real life. Maybe when things like Economy Comfort get introduced into AS the seats could be revised as well ? Like make the economy what it really is,
It's not quite like that. I fly planes with Leisure Plus seats in Eco and it works out just fine. But I only use them on routes up to 1500km. With my newest airline I try three different seating configurations on my A321 fleet. One for anything up to 1500 (192 pax), one for 1501-2500 (160 pax) and one for 2501-4500 (150 pax). Works well for the time being.
You can definitely make your airline profitable only with standard, leisure/leisure plus seats.
What happens though is that the game engine is overly bent to comfort rates. The result is an airline installing better seats will be able to raise the prices disproportionally and still have a better flight rating than the competitor with cheaper flight price and leisure seats, resulting in much better profits -> faster growth -> dominance.
Many players are thus switching to fancy seating and higher ticket price. Not realistic at all, but it works in this virtual world...