Fluctuating route demand?

[Commercial Air Services]

I stumbled across something purely by accident. Somehow I inadvertently loaded the "Edit Route" screen of a route that was already running for about two months and had changed the ticket price. I then realized that in two months time the demand on that route had slightly increased and that I could now increase the price 10 or some Euros, which is not much but I was able to make an extra grand or so after adjusting the price. I then went on to doing the same thing on my other routes and found that it was the case with all of them. After increasing all the route ticket prices I was earning about 10K more per day than I used to. The next month I again found that the demand had increased slightly and again I adjusted the prices upward again increasing my profits slightly.

I understand that this is often the case in the real world but how does this mechanism work in AM? At the moment I have only a handful of routes which makes it easy to adjust them all every month, but it will become seriously tedious and at some stage impossible as my routes become more. I can imagine if some enormous airline with hundreds, even thousands of routes found the time and the patience to fine tune all of its routes it would instantly raise its earnings by a good amount, and by instantly I mean after sitting there the entire day editing routes.

[1993matias]

It is the 'hub effect', the more routes you have from a hub, the more passengers travel with you. The effect is very small though.

I don't edit my old routes every day, unless they are less than 100% loadfactor. And I don't think there are that many other airlines - if any - editing all their routes daily.

[Commercial Air Services]

The hub effect you say

That is a good concept I guess, very true to real I would imagine. Though it would be nice to be able to edit them all at once. Lets say an option where one could input the the desired load percentage and have all the routes automatically adjust their price to match exactly 100%.

What bothers me is that if your routes are all already at 100% you would never know that the demand has increased because it would forever stay at 100%. Unless of course someone jumps on that route with you and you have to share the demand in which case it would become less than 100% and you'd adjust accordingly.

Instead the only way of maintaining it is to open and edit every route individually every month. Which obviously becomes more and more tedious as the airline grows. And it is exactly with these bigger airlines that this makes more of a difference.

I for example was able to earn an extra 1,000 per route on average every month by adjusting them. In an airline with say 500 routes an extra 1000 per route would obviously equate to 500,000 extra for the month, which equates to an extra 6,000,000! for the year. That is one extra decent domestic aircraft (in 1955) giving you three or four new routes each earning its worth.

So can you see where I'm going with this It might make an insignificant difference in the short term but over longer terms as we start talking years it becomes quite significant. Above all it grows exponentially and becomes more important as the airline grows.

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I'm sorry if I'm being too pedantic with this but it just seems so frustrating to be sitting on some extra cash and be forced to ignore it because of the inability to earn it efficiently.

[1993matias]

You can look at it this way: Nobody else bothers to edit all their routes in order to earn 500k more per month. And if you have 500 routes, your DOP is probably 50 million plus - 500k makes little to no difference with that amount of cash.

But I see your point though.

[Commercial Air Services]

Matias... indeed I did not notice that one incurs marketing costs every month when editing routes

I only observed the pop up message recently and I ran the numbers. It certainly far surpasses the increase in profits one makes. However it is possible to edit routes once a year for instance which turns things around a bit.

I just thought I owed anyone reading this my findings, just now I set some poor fledgling airline off to do something that isn't exactly beneficial.

[Virgin Serbia]

Ahh, the hub effect!

The hub effect works in 2 ways. The longer you operate a given route, the more passengers will fly with you...
And the more routes you have from a hub, the more will connect to another one of your flights...

It is most certainly worth looking at. I always set my prices so that i get a loadfactor of around 85-90%. After a few game days i just update the route without changing ticket prices, and the loadfactor is suddenly 95-100%! With all the extra earnings too