Hello! - Looking for some more specific advice. / A rant about My first few days.

Hello!

I recently found the game and I am really enjoying it and the level of detail! The game I will be talking about below is my third game, I liquidated the first two as I started in the UK and purchased planes that were too big and tried to fly internationally! Since then I’ve read through the “AS for beginners - an attempted blog” a couple of times and its helped me figure out basics of the UI and how to start operations generally. However I still feel like I’m missing or misunderstanding some important things. While I don’t have any real direct questions I was hoping for some more specific advice for my current airline or for someone to simply confirm some of the conclusions I have come up with in the paragraphs below.

From reading the tutorial in this forum and looking at a few others and watching a couple of video’s the main thing about being a beginner is choosing where you start wisely! The consensus seemed to be the following:

  • No competition for domestic flights.

  • Not part of any treaty.

  • Does not have unrestricted market access.

  • Have at least a couple medium sized airport with demand etc.

I spent about 3 hours looking for a country that matched that criteria and found that it was pretty specific and very uncommon to find a place with all four of those things! Although I didn’t look at all servers as I spent three hours just looking at 1! In the end I settled with Cuba. I realise that this isn’t ideal for a few reasons. One being that its a fairly small country, second that I can’t connect flights to the US later on, third there is a giant airline that does routes from Cuba to all around the Caribbean so there is very little room for expansion later, and finally the airport sizes and demand are not super high. However I decided to give it a go as it was the first country I had found with no domestic competition AND it has restricted market access.

So after I picked Cuba, I had a look at some of the routes I could run and decided on using the “Bombardier Dash8-Q400 NextGen BASIC” so I leased three. (Probably my first mistake - after picking Cuba). I chose them because the tutorial suggests its a popular and often good choice for beginner games (I must admit I don’t have much knowledge about passenger airliners). I compared all of the Q400’s and with the routes and picked the NextGen Basic since it had higher profit than the others even for the same amount of seats. I believe my mistake being that three aircraft with 80 seats each was too many for me to schedule flights for as the number of airports bigger than 1 with more than 1 demand is fairly low. (Or maybe I’ve just not experienced that much demand yet).

Two of my planes are running flights from HAV to various other smaller airports around Cuba. One thing I didn’t realise when I picked Cuba was that one of the 4 demand airports (Varadero) is so close to the capital airport, that I’ve not put a route between the two as I think they might be too close for it to be worthwhile? Furthermore another two of the 4 demand airports are very close together and I’m unsure if I should fly routes from both of those airports to the capital, while writing this I’m starting to think that I should as the game has calculated the demand for both airports and its not like people are actually travelling from the local area to create that demand! (If you understand my meaning).

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The good news is I am getting a fair number of passengers on my flights although they are not totally full. I'm thinking this is partially because my image is still somewhat low (I'm paying my staff above the national average so it is rising!) and another part due to not all of my flights having all of the possible demand calculation times. I didn't chose the three day delay as I decided it would be better to start making some money instead of just having the planes sitting around. Not sure if this was the correct thing to do or not, but regardless I have been changing the schedule's almost daily trying to figure things out anyway.

One of the reasons I have been changing my flights so much is because I feel like my connections are not linking up, I have been changing them over and over again and I still feel like they are not connecting as much as I expected them to. It was only today that I realised that maybe its due to the distances involved and maybe just isn’t worth it (What I meant by Cuba’s size being a problem). If that is the case should I just switch to having flights from every airport to every other airport? Or should I still have all of the flights flying to or from Havana. I have been scheduling my flights using the wave format (or trying to) making sure my flights land 1 hour and 1 minute before 00:00, 06:00, 12:00 and 18:00 (Minimum transfer window at HAV is listed as 1 hour). Which are the times when both of my aircraft are scheduled to depart from Havana. My current schedules: 

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Thank you to anyone who takes the time to read my post! :slight_smile:

Airline: Dowie Airlines

Server: croydon

First of all, thank you for clearly explaining what you're doing and what your questions are. That makes it a lot easier and more enjoyable to help in comparison to someone who complains that it just doesn't work. Second, I'm by no means the most experienced person on the forum but I've learnt quite a few things over my time here. Thirdly, AS is not real life. I tried to play it that way at first, but the game model is just a bit different and you have to adapt to it. Passengers are more than willing to connect, economy passengers don't care about the price of their flight that much (no LCCs), airlines have thousands of planes (all leased) etc... However, this doesn't mean that it can't be fun - you just have to understand the premise of the world.

You hit the nail on the head that Cuba is a pretty poor place to start. A country with a strong domestic market is key, but equally is having countries nearby that aren't investment-open and have some international traffic. Take a look at Venezuela, Peru, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, etc... Turkey and Mexico can be good too but they are usually at least somewhat occupied. Focus on domestic first. I didn't add my first international route for my current airline, Bosphorus Wings, until the 5th week. Even then, keep international routes short. Your issue with Cuba is a pretty limited domestic market and a number of investment open islands nearby meaning that a large airline can swoop in on an established server. 

Regarding aircraft choice, it's kind of a personal decision. As I'm sure you've read, don't go with anything larger than the CSeries or E195 - but equally, don't go much smaller. Those planes are easy enough to fill but also allow you to make a healthy profit. Arguably, it's more important what you put in the plane though. I can't say exactly what works for seating, but let's just say it's the opposite of what airlines are going for today in economy class. Don't be afraid to give your passengers more space, since you will easily be able to increase prices.

Always choose the three-day delay if possible. If I'm adding a frequency or established in a market, then you don't necessarily need to delay but otherwise, I would try to. It allows you to see the true performance of a route.

I will say that I'm impressed with your load factor. I wouldn't have guessed it would be so high with your current config, but that's good for you! Do remember that AS passengers will only fly 1.5x the direct length of their journey which means that, being in Havana, it is hard for you to connect people around Cuba. I have the same problem in Istanbul, but there is significantly more origin/destination demand. However, point to point isn't a good strategy at your size, especially since most Cuban airports are pretty small. Cuban airlines can work but for a beginner, it's not the market I would recommend. Good job using the waves, although the amount of maintenance time you have is surprisingly high - hopefully, you can get more than 3 departures per day on a regional prop aircraft! 

It would be interesting to know what your overall profit margin is.

Best,

Aidan

Thank you for your reply! I really appreciate your help. As it happens in my initial games I was aiming for a LCC, thinking it would give me chance to compete against the larger well established airlines, I figured though that even at a lower price its unlikely that passengers will prefer your flights against more established higher rated airlines. 

I probably should have said in my original post that the schedule I posted I only created today and this time I did use the 3 day delay - so it isn't actually in effect yet. Mostly because I wasn't sure if using the one day delay would cause cancellation of some flights that already had tickets booked (Although I will start using it more often now!). The previous schedule was somewhat more congested - although the second aircraft had much less and only had a couple of flights a day. This was mostly because I was struggling to create a wave due to the lengths of the flights. The new schedule probably has the same amount of flights it just uses both aircraft more equally.

Two of the airports I fly to are less than 300km while the other flight is over double that at 686km. Because of the big difference I initially tried to fit two of the shorter flights where I would only have one of the longer flight. However there wasn't enough room for the final return trip of the second shorter flight to make it back in time for the wave departure.  Perhaps I should try to not be so strict with the departure times to see if I can fit in some more flights! That being said I still have one of the three aircraft totally unused as I feel like I don't really have enough demand to warrant a third.  

Here is my current profit: 

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Falling quite short so far! haha. (Company was started on Tuesday)

I think in terms of where to pick I often just see what looks like heavily contested areas and its somewhat scary looking when thinking about trying to start something myself. I think tomorrow I'll have a look on another server and try to find somewhere with more domestic potential! I'll keep my Cuba game going too and see what I can manage with it! Again thanks a lot for your reply. I appreciate it greatly! 

I will simply review your four starter Criteria as I dont have the time to write anything longer, but I am sure some better supporter will. 

+ No competition for domestic flights. Seriously, is this what you are looking for? Sure this might be a must in some small demand places but others you will never get away from competition. If you are looking for no competition at all you will barely find an suitable existing place. Even if you find one domestic route without competition you will still need to compete on others to get the feed to fill that one route. I know most people say in tutorials to start small and stuff but you will never be able to have an airline on a larger scale in small places. Sure it is important to learn the game somewhere calm but to really get big you need to fight in China, US, Europe, etc, and it will be impossible to avoid competition in these places. Also when you have a good strategy with good ORS you can compete with how many other airlines you possibly want and still get the passagers. I for example penetrated the headquarters of the biggest airline on Stapleton and surprisingly I am able to get good loads only because of my perfect ORS. 

+ Not part of any treaty. Again, I am not really for playing a monopoly because it gets me bored. Also being part of a treaty (EU) means that you have the whole continent to play with greatly broadening your reach. An airline in Turkey, Russia, Indonesia, Japan or Brazil can be very large but never match a large (10 million pax per week) EU, China or US carrier. China and US aren't treaties but they are still hypermarkets which is the same thing in my topic here. 

+ Does not have unrestricted market access. This one is fairly obvious. You certainly dont want to start in one of these markets as you will always have bigger fish fighting you. If you really want to play in one of these markets then launch a holding elsewhere in a closed market and found a sub here. Launching a holding in an unrestricted market is pure stupidity. 

+ Have at least a couple medium sized airport with demand etc. This is a great point, but is fairly hard to comply with the first point if thinking about this one. You just got to know that competition doesn't matter as long as you have slots. Neither is this a necessity if you are part of a treaty or never plan to be very large. You could for example run a fairly decent size carrier in Singapore although you will never be able to go huge due to the slot restraint. You could in the same way launch a carrier in China and never expand to a second hub.

To summarise as a newbie I would go to some small remote place to learn the game and then try to attack a hyper market. Although I would never really pay attention to any other point the third one. 

The first bad sign is that you don't feel that you have enough demand to warrant a third aircraft... as CBE said, there's obviously a relationship between demand and competition. But how will you grow if you don't feel the demand is there (I will say, it likely is but your ORS isn't yet high enough and you don't offer connections to other destinations)? It depends on your goal - if you want to be able to play in a hypermarket, then you need to learn somewhere easier. If you want to stay put, then choose a medium-sized country that is underserved and focus on domestic traffic. Personally, I'm still not at the stage where I feel like I could compete in the EU/US/China and won't be for a bit still, so that's why I'd recommend learning in a place that has some domestic demand - as I said above. 

The airports don't have to be large; you'd be amazed at how many people want to travel to even one or two bar airports if they're domestic - but you need to have a path for expansion as well. Did you look at the ASRouteMap "where to start" tool? It's pretty useful and mostly accurate. That is a really quick way to look through the worlds and find somewhere approachable to start in. Don't be afraid to restart!

As a beginner I generally suggest to try to avoid competition as much as possible but dont be scared by it. You will always have competition on connections anyways. I have previously mentored players who where so scared on competition that they didn't dare to start in a place where there where 1000 departures by someone who didn't know what he was doing. You just need some relative peace to try to develop a model. When you have done that you can come to EU, US and China and be like "Whatup" and just own the place.

Personally, my first carrier was in Sweden and even though there fairly was any competition in the big places I was so scared of competition that I flew around LETs and Saabs between two bar airports just to avoid the slightest competition. Thankfully my fantastic mentor (you know who you are) told me to stop this prop rubbish and get some jets and attack the core routes by offering a better product. I was like "No, I have tried those routes with Saabs and it failed, how will I fill A320s on those routes?" and he was like "There is competition but as long as your product is good you will fill your planes". I got an A318 and to my surprise it was completely full, it was also fairly profitable. Later on I upgraded to an A321 and to my surprise it was also doing good between high competition routes such as ARN-OSL and ARN-CPH. After wards my second fantastic mentor (you also know who you are) told me that "Ok now you have a good competitive product but you also need to make money".  This got me thinking of actually developing my golden formula (which I didn't steal from others like some people). I choose a type of seat and went out to experiment to find the max price point to keep a 99 ORS, this is when I realised that Rubio and I use the same formula. After having a proven formula I found an opportunity in Malaysia and went straight into the cut throat competition and due to my superior ORS and fantastic profitability I was able to monopolise the market during some the worst AGEX. Dont know why I wrote this but just tried to tell my story, it might help.

I disagree that you aren't ready for some serious competition, just that I wouldn't use your seats. I would suggest you give the cut throat markets a try, you seem to do great in Turkey so it cant be much worse? Just make sure to have partners, partners are everything. Even your biggest competitor could be a great partner. Personally I partner with ALL competition in China and my biggest competitors in US, it greatly helps all of us. It isn't worth it to try to do everything yourself, just egoistic. 

I would like to add some more countries. Chile, Algeria, Tunesia, Iran, Saudi-Arabia.

You might want to watch here: https://www.asroutemap.info/start.aspif you can find a decent starting point. Works very well.

Regarding competition: With the right pattern and profile, you can compete with everybody. But to find that setup you will most likely need some time. Hence it would be good to find a spot / niche where you can test and learn and then start over with the right setup.

Regarding competition: With the right pattern and profile, you can compete with everybody.

Or dont compete at all, be friends instead. Our collaboration in China helps everyone as does my collaborations in the US. Previously I was also for competition and no IL and no alliance partner to IL with competitors and all that rubbish but ultimately AS is a game and we are here to have fun and make friends. Some people just take this game too seriously and competitor hostilities can be worse than in the real world. 

@highscore Ones upon a time when we were competitors both of us where very hostile towards each other and it was so wrong. We should have had IL instead. I am so sorry for that. 

CBE, good point. And yes, it was wrong to fight against each other the way we did.

Still I am not against a good competition. Even with ILs competition can be very much vibrant.

If you will ever fly to South Africa, we can still have ILs, CBE.

EDIT: you are flying to JNB. :)

Ok - There is a lot of good points here! I will say though that the criteria I listed in my first post wasn't what I had decided was good, just what I took away from reading the tutorials/watching tutorial video's. Perhaps with the no competition one I took it a little more zealously than it was intended. For now I'm going to have a look for another domestic market on another server, and try to be less worried about the competition already present but use it to try and figure out the ORS system and try to find what works best. I had visited  https://www.asroutemap.info/start.asp but had not realised how useful it could be for picking a starting position so I'll definitely use that now! 

Thanks for all the time and help! :)

Keep us updated and good luck!

Hi Dowie,

i think we are very similar, we make the same "mistakes" for the same reasons at the beginning.

After 8 Months my Havanna Airservice in Ellinikon looks like this -> https://ellinikon.airlinesim.aero/app/info/enterprises/73293

It's far from perfect but to give you a look that Cuba can work.

Matth has told me that Cuba isn't a good and easy spot but it is quiet to learn and with patience you can build a nice little airline.

The advice from the AidanG, CBE and highscore are very good and helpful. 

If i can help you with Cuba, write me an PM.

Keep on runing.

Apologies for not being able to add much to this thread. However, I do have one point:

If you decide to continue operating a Cuban airline, international routes to Canada are incredibly lucrative. HAV-YYZ and HAV-YUL are routes that make a bunch of money (if there's limited competition, of course).

I've run a Cuban airline before, so feel free to PM me if you'd like. Best wishes to you, and a very warm welcome to AirlineSim!

Apologies for not being able to add much to this thread. However, I do have one point:

 

If you decide to continue operating a Cuban airline, international routes to Canada are incredibly lucrative. HAV-YYZ and HAV-YUL are routes that make a bunch of money (if there’s limited competition, of course).

 

I’ve run a Cuban airline before, so feel free to PM me if you’d like. Best wishes to you, and a very warm welcome to AirlineSim!


This is excellent advice, start with smaller jets on these flights, I would recommend SSJs as they are relatively inexpensive and have excellent range. I would suggest that you interline with a Canadian Airline as well. A smart operator with a Canadian Airline should be willing to IL with an airline in Cuba as both will benefit. As the flights get busy, be prepared to upgrade to larger aircraft. HAV to YYZ and YUL should, at some point, be able to support 321 or 739. YYZ should be able to support multiple dailies. Another lucrative market is Cuba to Mexico.

Apologies if I previously sounded too harsh on Cuba  ;) . It's a market I haven't played before but only heard (mixed) things about. However, I think the vast majority of advice still stands from above. I guess my main takeaway is that everyone is comfortable with different levels of competition in their market. 

And thanks for the encouragement to try bigger markets, CBE! The point about everyone interlining isn't something I had necessarily considered, but it makes a lot of sense for the larger areas.  

Good luck!