Hey guys. This is an idea that I've been working over in my head for a while and I didn't see anything recent on the boards here about it.
In the airline industry, airlines are forced to gain and keep the loyalty of many people, particularly in cities where there are large amounts of competition. They do this by establishing frequent flyer programs, which reward customers (usually business travelers) for flying with the airline. I was wondering whether Airlinesim could do something like this.
This would probably be difficult to implement, but I think it would be a worthy use of time and resources for the AS development team.
1. Added (concrete) benefit to alliances: all members of the alliance would have the opportunity to be a part of the Frequent Flyer Program
2. More realistic competition: maybe if an airline serves more of the important business markets to a city, the demand on the flights to that city is increased (basically a frequent flyer base: if you serve more of the important destinations from a city, businesspeople will be more likely to join your frequent flyer program)
I realize that a major roadblock for this idea would be the fact that the AS server (to my understanding) does not keep track of all the individual passengers and their trips. For this idea to work, my guess would be that instead of having effects on the passengers themselves, the frequent flyer program could affect the demand calculations for the specific destination pairs.
I was thinkiing about this myself recently, and maybe I throw in some of my ideas:
* moneywise, handle the freuqent flyer program (FFP) as reserves: a certain amount per flight (e.g. 5% of the standard price or ticket price) is accured on an extra account (visible on the balance sheet), of course not for every ticket, but just for some passengers per flight
* when PAX use their milage, then the flight costs are deducted from this account; of course this is only possible after the FFP is already running for some time (one, two weeks maybe), so in the beginning it's only a huge investment resp. another drain of cash for your airline
* FFP would make your flights a bit more attractive in ORS, the size of your FFP would make it more likely that you attract new PAX to register with it (and of course you could do some advertising/marketin compaign to boost it a bit)
* FFP might be shared with your alliance (no other contractual agreements besides that), thus creating maybe a (small) flow of money between alliance players, but also with random factors. Doing this would make alliance-internal interlining more attractive.
* Maybe after a quarter or half a year, you can also benefit from release of reserves, as some unused accured millage will get void.
As Ceo-Group-M mentioned, this would counteract the balance of the game which in essence lies in the fact that everyone has the same chance of bookings every day, regardless if it's a new airline or an established one. Big airlines get another way to just buy themselves better ratings and it would make it even harder for small airlines to compete.
Competing is something that also happens in real live. So i believe that main airlines will always have more connections than a small airline. This is true in any scenario. But small airlines can find niche markets and operate from there, i have seen this happen many times. I just started a new airline in Argentina on Tempelhof and its going great, but i did not go to one of the main airports.
As Ceo-Group-M mentioned, this would counteract the balance of the game which in essence lies in the fact that everyone has the same chance of bookings every day, regardless if it's a new airline or an established one. Big airlines get another way to just buy themselves better ratings and it would make it even harder for small airlines to compete.
No, I don't think so. It would be just another factor for prefering one flight over another. Yes, big airlines maybe get another thing they can excel due to their abundant money - but that's not the fault of this new feature, that's a fault of an imbalance elsewhere. Maybe you have to invest some thoughts on how to balance this feature a bit (so that it gets risky, even for big airlines).
As I said above: the milage accural should be reflected as some kind of money reserves (similar to the leasing deposit)：some share of the PAX revenue will be transferred to that account once the flight is executed and will therefore deduct your income now and will be used to 'pay' for the flight once the reward is 'used'.
As long as your FFP is just your own thing, there's just a delay in payment - and you're acually lowering your prices/income.
Once you start sharing your FFP with your alliance or interlining partners, it will also establish a flow of money between those companies (at least as I currently imagine it): if a PAX is considered doing the booking with a FFP, all of his flights on his trip (or just the ones using this alliance) will be considered as eligable and of of the operators will have to handle the reward reserves - so there will be e.g. 5% of standard price deducted from every operators income and accumulated on one FFP account of one of them (this one makes a bit more profit, but can't use the money now).
After a while the reward flight is cashed in and he gets the money from the reserve account. So, I can imagine that this might actually add some risk to bigger airlines with lots of interlining agreements as this might drain away money from them. Keep chances equal for each leg of a trip that the milage accural will happen for that operator and it might maybe take out some money from the big player's income.
I always think FFPs could be a coding and accounting nightmare for this game - for both Martin & AS side and for players because of the sheer complexity, not even mentioning "sharing" FFPs between different carriers. However, FFP is indeed an extremely important component of the industry and definitely fun to play with.
My suggestion is always to start from the very simple, and see if any features could be added on a trial and error basis. Under the constraint that AS do not track behaviors of individual customers, I just think of an example step by step roadmap, building on schoos' idea:
1) Create a token FFP program that's visible by other players, but do not have any real effects.
2) Start a revenue-based FFP program on the company side only (not on customer side), in which an accounts payable balance is set-up to accrue x% of the revenue of each flight, which becomes the total outstanding points to customers. [Accrual Simulation]
3) After maybe a month every flight would have y% of the revenue coming from the company's accounts payable balance. [Redemption Simulation]
- by doing this start-up airlines get a boost as they have less pressure to payout at the beginning stage
4) Companies should then have the function to customize their accrual and payout ratio, which affects their image. Once set, changes (i.e devaluation) will be penalized.
5) Companies can sell points (for a limit) to raise revenue for an expansion.
6) Companies can join FFPs by combining the accounts payable balance and image related to FFP.
To this point this is already quite a complicated feature, so I would maybe not 'fantasizing' further.
I can really see this happening, just imagine that i have a full load in econ, but there are still seats over in Business, in real live they would upgrade you to the higher class just to be able to sell one extra seat, this could be done with an FFP or even it should happen anyways :)