Connecting Pax

[Unknown98]

Connecting PAX is something I want to add after the reset, at some point. I don't think it will be too difficult but I just want to have a discussion on it.

What I was thinking is something along these lines: The game will take any given route, and calculate the amount of routes you have TO the departure airport and FROM the arrival airport. Then, it does some calculations, not exactly sure what, but essentially the more routes you have to/from the respective airports the more opportunity you will have for connecting pax. 

Lets say for simplicity's sake you have only 4 routes. You operate one route, DFW-LAX. You have another route, IAH-DFW. And you have two more routes, LAX-NRT and LAX-SYD. 

The way connecting pax might work for the DFW-LAX route, is it takes the 1 route from IAH and calculates a certain % of people that are connecting to LAX from IAH. Then, it takes the two routes to NRT and SYD, and it calculates another certain % of people that are connecting from DFW to those two destinations. Then it adds that demand to the standard demand for the DFW-LAX route. 

It would need to consider of course what days the routes are active, if you only fly LAX-SYD on Friday, Sunday and Tuesday then you wouldn't get connecting pax for the other days. Like I said this is just ideas and I have not done any actual calculations yet but I just want to write these down for future reference so when it comes time to implement it I can look back on it.

[Zortan]

My suggestion is to work with the timing and the routes. For example, not many pax will want a 23-hour layover, but plenty will spring for the 2-hour. Connecting pax should also pay less since airlines charge a premium for direct flights. I'm sure this will all be hard to implement, but a lot of the spamliners in AE work off of connecting pax. how connecting pax work in AE is that if you have a flight from an airport and another flight from that airport and that airport is a "hub" (5+ gates and you paid for it to be a hub) then they'll connect. They pay half-price on both flights. Spamliners just have a bunch of flights through a hub, raise the prices to well over double the original price and bam they've made money off connecting pax. Either that or they have $1 prices but that's a different story. Basically don't turn the connecting pax into what AE has, because that'll just create spammers. Basically for a hub, my advice would be to work with timing, since passengers generally choose flights based on the layover.

[rlmrace]

I think another important consideration is the location of the connecting airport. In your example, no passenger should fly from SYD to NRT connecting via LAX (the advertisement I made for the PEK to SZN flight via NGO in the role-play forum is just for fun and shouldn't have a real market in game).

Perhaps a way to limit it is to calculate for distance traveled: passengers will only connect if the total distance of the individual legs is less than 130% of the distance between the origin and destination airports. Eg. if dist (IAH=DFW) + dist (DFW=LAX) + dist (LAX=NRT) < 1.3 x dist (IAH=NRT) then there will be some connecting passengers; if dist (NRT=LAX) + dist (SYD=LAX) > 1.3 x dist (NRT=SYD) then there is no connecting passengers.

[D960]

Connecting passengers will be a good step and Alitalia has already been doing it. Here you are a label with my six waves for Milan Malpensa.

[AnDrEw]

The main problem with connecting pax is price. Every airline game I've seen that does connections just add the prices of the two (or more) flights together, which just isn't how it works. I know the price system isn't perfect and it's really hard to have flexible pricing like IRL, but connecting flights make the problem a whole lot worse. IRL, connections are a huge market and connecting flights are usually cheaper than direct ones, but in the game, if you simply add up the prices of the two flights, that means there will be no market for connections when a direct flight exists. So yes, I'd love a connection mechanism, but only if the price can be somewhat realistic (for example, putting an automatic discount on connection flights).

[Anzatax]

Well if I remember in Airline Empires the price of tickets for connecting pax was half of the original ticket price. But I don't think that is necessarily realistic.

[fsclips]

I agree that timing should play a role.

I am not sure if it could be implemented, but let's say if the time between arrival and departure of a flight is less then 40min there should be zero connecting Pax. If it is between 40min and 2:30hrs then the percentage should be quite high and then taper off until about 5hours where it should go back to zero.

Also the connections would need to make sense. A flight coming into Europe from the US would only feed into flights to Asia or within Europe, but not into a flight departing back to the US.

Again, I am not sure how all of this could be implemented and if it is even possible.

Just my two cents.

Stefan

[sfk]

We should also count the time spent on international arrivals

[Zortan]

I agree that timing should play a role.

I am not sure if it could be implemented, but let's say if the time between arrival and departure of a flight is less then 40min there should be zero connecting Pax. If it is between 40min and 2:30hrs then the percentage should be quite high and then taper off until about 5hours where it should go back to zero.

Also the connections would need to make sense. A flight coming into Europe from the US would only feed into flights to Asia or within Europe, but not into a flight departing back to the US.

Again, I am not sure how all of this could be implemented and if it is even possible.

Just my two cents.

Stefan

Connections under 40 minutes are possible. I had a 30-min once at SLC and didn't miss the flight. Airports have minimum connection times but the general rule is 30 minutes minimum for domestic to domestic and 40-50 for domestic to international, international to domestic, or international to international.

Geography is also very important, as Stefan has said.