Routes losing demand over time?

[Sheep Air]

Previously, if you were on a route with no competition, you could go in and increase your fares periodically, as demand grew slowly over time. Recently, whenever I've tried this, I've ended up having to decrease my fares (todays example FCO-SOF was €608 for before I touched it, had to reduce to €589 to get back to 100% once I had tried to adjust it - I'm the only airline on the route, and nothing else changed).

Deliberate change or accident?

[Seattle]

:? .... thats weird

[Jps]

Previously, if you were on a route with no competition, you could go in and increase your fares periodically, as demand grew slowly over time. Recently, whenever I've tried this, I've ended up having to decrease my fares (todays example FCO-SOF was €608 for before I touched it, had to reduce to €589 to get back to 100% once I had tried to adjust it - I'm the only airline on the route, and nothing else changed).

Deliberate change or accident?

More routes in each airport cause the pax demand for each route to be less

[Sheep Air]

But this is a change as to how it has been before.

[Air Elbonia]

ignore Jps.  that's a misstatement at best.

Odds are, if everything else stayed the same that was in your control, something changed that wasn't.  More cities served by an airport allows for the boost in revenue you notice when editing routes later.  From the sound of things, someone at one of the airlines dropped the hub, closed some routes, or was forcibly removed from the game for cheating or the like thus lowering this number thereby reducing the demand.  You know in that kind of a situation, you can just never finalize the edit to the route and the profit will stay the same until competition comes into the route.

[Sheep Air]

Ok, that's a great explanation for one route (and can understand it).

But it seems to be a more widespread explanation than that explanation would well explain. For example, I closed out one plane... and then decided not to upgrade it after all. Every single route that plane served (ex-LHR) lost between 2-5k DOP. Now, we know that swapping out planes, you rarely get the same money back in for the same fare, but for all of those routes, I had to drop the fare by up to 50€ to get 100% load factor.

If I'm the only one noticing then maybe it is as you say, and maybe it's a factor of fewer people playing this round and just not the increasing demand which we are used to. But that doesn't mean demand should be dropping across the board? At the start of the game, I could still increase routes with no competition by up to 50€ per day... now I daren't touch them since I know to maintain LF, I'll have to drop my prices.

All very odd!

[pseudoswede]

I've noticed that phenomenon, too.

[Air Elbonia]

Ok, that's a great explanation for one route (and can understand it).

But it seems to be a more widespread explanation than that explanation would well explain. For example, I closed out one plane... and then decided not to upgrade it after all. Every single route that plane served (ex-LHR) lost between 2-5k DOP. Now, we know that swapping out planes, you rarely get the same money back in for the same fare, but for all of those routes, I had to drop the fare by up to 50€ to get 100% load factor.

If I'm the only one noticing then maybe it is as you say, and maybe it's a factor of fewer people playing this round and just not the increasing demand which we are used to. But that doesn't mean demand should be dropping across the board? At the start of the game, I could still increase routes with no competition by up to 50€ per day... now I daren't touch them since I know to maintain LF, I'll have to drop my prices.

All very odd!

If it's fairly wide-spread, the sudden drop in routes served must have been in your hub itself rather then in the target city [both are considered independently of each other].

[Jps]

Why am I not experiencing the drop?

[MusicAIR]

But it seems to be a more widespread explanation than that explanation would well explain. For example, I closed out one plane... and then decided not to upgrade it after all. Every single route that plane served (ex-LHR) lost between 2-5k DOP. Now, we know that swapping out planes, you rarely get the same money back in for the same fare, but for all of those routes, I had to drop the fare by up to 50€ to get 100% load factor.

If I'm the only one noticing then maybe it is as you say, and maybe it's a factor of fewer people playing this round and just not the increasing demand which we are used to. But that doesn't mean demand should be dropping across the board? At the start of the game, I could still increase routes with no competition by up to 50€ per day... now I daren't touch them since I know to maintain LF, I'll have to drop my prices.

All very odd!

I've now noticed this too...I took delivery of some new planes and was upgrading the A/C on some routes - yet if I decided not to do so, and tried to recreate the route as originally set, I'd get less than 100% LF.  Not cool!