That being said, pax could be willing to pay higher when their is less capacity on the route.
Nice theory, but it does not work, IMHO. I think it's a mistake to consider that passengers know the size of the planes, the number of competitors, the price of all seats etc. on a given route. They know how much a trip costs, in average, on this route, and they check if the proposed price is reasonable or not. Most of them don't care about the size of the plane, and at least in Europe, it is completely impossible to know if the plane is fully booked or not; this information is not available when you order a ticket, and even partially hidden afterwards (with some companies, you can chose your seat among a selection of seats, not all of them). For instance, it happened to me once to pay an expensive ticket, assuming that the plane was full, and we were 10 in a 150 seats aircraft. Too bad :-)
In any case, if your suggestion was true, real airlines would tend to decrease the frequency of flights, to fill them as much as possible with high ticket price. It's not the case, at least in Europe: you often end up in 50% loaded planes running 4 times a day. I'm really convinced that high frequencies brings you extra passengers, because all experienced travelers have already missed a plane, and know how painful it is to wait for 24 hours because your company runs only a daily trip. High frequency is a service, as much as free meals or good coffee.
You are right, from a demanders perspective. Whether the plane is a b1900 or a 747-4 flying a route, my view on price isn't affected much [though many fliers i know, whether plane fans or not, know the difference between a tiny turboprop and a nice mid-size jet, and it does impact their spending behaviour]. Demand perspective is a relatively fixed standpoint. You yourself may only pay €300 for a trip between XXX-ZZZ, however. from a suppliers perspective: at €300 euros, there may be 5,000 people a day who want to travel that route. If you put a 737/a320 on it, only once a day, you can only reasonably supply the 200-400 seats [depending on config]. You raise the price, where competition allows, to where maybe 1,000 people a day will want to fly that route [say €600 euros]. You yourself may only be willing pay €300 euros, thereby you no longer are among that group of people willing to fly that route when it's at €600. This is supply side economics. I'll get into other considerations which affect real life routeplanning decisions, and are planned to be implemented, but as of yet haven't made it into the game [unfortunately].
Actually, the game correlates reasonably well in regards to which routes are profitable and how frequency plays in.
I can't agree, definitely. OK, I am not experienced in this game, and I wouldn't dare being too harsh with the developers, but I really feel that one should avoid the reaction: "I don't want to change anything, so I will find any reasons explaining why this bug is actually a feature of the game". I won't explain again the pax number bug, but my feeling is that the algorithm does not need fine tuning, it needs to be reconsidered from scratch. Here is a list of unexpected behaviors:
* When you don't have any competitors on a route, the optimal strategy is to run only one flight with 100% load and high ticket price. This shouldn't be, in real world, you should have an optimal frequency, with an intermediate ticket price, and an intermediate load.
* When you are in a saturated market, the optimal strategy is to run low-frequency flights to hundred of destinations, and you earn more money in going to ridiculously small airports. This shouldn't be. In the real world, you should never make profit, even with small planes, between two very small airports: such flights simply do not exist (with a few exceptions, for instance if you are lucky enough to travel to a hub for a low-cost company), you always need a transfer through a bigger airport in this case.
In real life, yes, you don't just fly one-way when you have a monopoly. Optimal in real life is likely around 2-4 frequencies in that respect. HOWEVER, in real life you have two big demand modications yet fully or properly implemented. One, you have airline reputation [which is affected by service level you provide] and Two, you have substantial hub effect you can create for yourself out of thin air [any passengers you sell one+ stop tickets to].
The former, will likely come in with multi-class seating [which i do hope to code in soon.] A strong reputation won't just be made up from your aircraft's seating configuration, but also through service levels with some peak bonus established near the 2-4 frequency range. If you're known for frequent flights, you're preferred by business where flexibility is key. This tends to help suppress prices a little as well [as airlines are looking to fill more seats, thereby play a little more with price for the demand effect] and helps boost the leisure travelers on the route.
The latter I've also reasonably figured out, and will come in varying degrees due to the level of hub you classify your airport at. It'll have a nice level of effective competition reduction for the formula, and will hopefully also be completed near the multiclass seating feature. This pushes airlines to pump more frequencies and lower fares into routes into a hub city. More capacity that's utilized [higher frequencies, lower fares tend to make greater capacity used] gets more passengers into a hub city. More passengers in a hub city tends to make up a greater number of people willing to save some money flying the one-stop flight, effectively shifting demand from AAA-BBB into AAA-XXX and XXX-BBB. Pooling this effect across a broader network makes for a nice boost to demand. Add in code-sharing through alliances to that and you add another Nth percent more people to the demand of a given route. [we have some limited effect of code-sharing by an alliance within the game, however proper codesharing is... a scary thought to code at the moment. I just can't come up with a good way to avoid double-selling tickets while offering the capability for you to book a passenger on an alliance partner's plane.]
I must say, however, that you are your route network in the eyes of many passengers, though things like orbitz are cutting that down a little it still holds true for the upper-echelon seats [first/biz]. If you serve a lot of cities, you're more likely to be favored by business travelers and you're more likely to be able to sell to some leisure travelers.
Oh, and maybe this is an American's perspective, but I know some of the most profitable routes can be the less frequent small turboprops servicing a small airport from a big[ger] one. They tend to have less demand, and thereby support relatively little competition for any given pair of cities direct HOWEVER, they're made profitable all around by the following facts. One, some routes into smaller airports are subsidized by gov'ts [small factor], Two tiny little planes are cheap to acquire [i've often seen orders for 15-20 embraears or bombardiers which were announced for the same as one 787 or larger plane.] Three, fuel burn on turboprops is a lot lighter typically, resulting in a lower break-even point. Four, tiny planes require [usually] less experienced pilots, thereby can be flown by cheaper pilots. On top of this, some don't even require a flight attendent, resulting in lower staffing costs thereby a lower break-even point on the route.
* When you look at the schedule of large airports, you can see only small frequency flights run by the same company. This shouldn't be. Just go to any big airport, and you will see that most routes are 3, 4, 5, up to 10 frequency routes.
You're right, i could try to play this off as something along the lines of those 3,4,5 or 10 frequency routes are served by multiple aircraft. I've been idly thinking about ways to improve the calculation in this respect wherein multiple planes can effectively service "one" route. As of yet, I haven't managed to come up with effective ways to do this without a very extensive redesign of the backend. Hopefully I can figure this out though. I've had a few sparks, but they fizzled out in some preliminary testing.
* On highly competitive routes, competition is so harsh that the price drops and the route is basically "screwed up". This shouldn't be. In the real world, companies are competing, but the average ticket price remains reasonable (keep in mind that the 1€ tickets are not average prices, most passengers on this routes pay much more than that, and in the few cases where a low-cost company tries to break the market, it is almost never on highly competitive routes: it is rather done to attract people to a small countryside airport).
This is a very serious problem, and as soon as multiworlds is finished, i'm going to try to push forward on multi-class seating and/or hub effect [whichever is more practical to code in terms of time and my perceptions of the effect will determine which first], as well as some improvements to the edit route page to allow for swapping aircraft on a route in one page and a way to mass discount or mark up your routes to make editing a little softer on the game-play for small and large airlines.
I acknowledge that it is possible to play the game as it is today. It is probably even possible to have fun doing that. However, it is not a good simulation, and experienced players might tend to be conservative because they know how to play. For instance, there is a post asking "why are you stupid enough to run 2-frequency routes?" in this forum, and I think the right answer is "because most players still think this game is a simulation, and they behave as if they were managing a real airline in the real world".
I may quibble a few points on what else makes it a poor simulation, but generally selling your project short doesn't get you far. Many of these are being addressed, but many are also skewed by factors which unfortunately are not yet in the game [as i've described above]. We hope to add them, to help rectify it a bit. Time, unfortunately, is a limited resource sometimes and presently with the current active player count at approximately 2,300 accounts, we've been devoting our time towards upgrading the site to support multiple worlds. If only i had all the time in the world, or the ability to plug my brain straight into the code... in either case, AM would have a lot more features a lot faster.
