New reputation system

[Zortan]

I don't mean to be rude, just giving some feedback (although admittedly I could have been nicer lol sorry)

My rep is currently 3.75%, and my 767s have between 204 and 259 economy seats, meaning that even with those prices I won't be able to fill the plane (or get close, in the case of the -300ERs). My MD-80 family aircraft are also losing money like crazy (but I do need to check on those prices and fix them a bit first, so I'll get back to you with results on those).

Plus, I'm still losing a ton off of IFS and bags since pax won't pay for them even at quite reasonable prices imo.

[sfk]

I have 74 rep. And all of my planes are making money. The only things is that my credit rating is now B. It was AAA before new rep thing came. Am I doing something wrong?

[Unknown98]

Well a rep of 3.75% should not be able to fill a plane at average prices because 4% rep is indicative of horrible service. But when I change the averaging formulas to not include the 0s your rep should probably go up; But I don't know how your airline is set up. Depends on your IFE as well, IFS is only half the reputation.

@sfk your profit margin probably went down.

[Zortan]

My IFE is very limited, because a lot of LCC's don't pay to equip their planes with IFE. I have overhead screens on a couple of 767s, and WiFi on a couple of 767s and a couple of MD-80s that costs $15 I think.

But just take Scoot as an example. They're a popular and profitable (as far as I know) Singaporean low-cost carrier that operates 787s, A320s and soon, 737s. They offer just about the same level of service as I do. There is no food available for free in Economy on any flight, and Business Class passengers get one free meal and one free drink. That's it. They also don't offer free checked bags, in-flight entertainment, or free anything. Not even free water. They also have some of the worst legroom ever, and still, they manage to pull in tons and tons of passengers because of their very low fares. My airline offers better service than them - we have free water on all flights, as well as unlimited non-alcoholic beverages on flights over 5 hours. We offer entertainment on some flights, and WiFi on some others. We offer a free meal in all classes on flights over 5 hours, and our buy-on-board for everything else isn't priced outrageously. They're pretty normal prices, especially compared with the prices of other airlines in the region (I've personally flown IndiGo and their prices aren't very different from mine).

[Anzatax]

Yup in Asia LCCs have very bad service quality but great prices. Is it actually the opposite in Europe and America?

[Zortan]

Lol we have bad service and low prices here as well, but not as much. Just looking at prices in India is insane. Just like $30 for a domestic flight - I couldn't imagine that here. From YVR, I can't find a single flight under $100, but LCCs are more limited here in Canada. From JFK and stuff you can get good ones, like Norwegian with $200 JFK-LGW in Economy. And in Europe you could fly LGW-ALC for just $29 which I find astounding haha

[Jamesthomeson]

Yup in Asia LCCs have very bad service quality but great prices. Is it actually the opposite in Europe and America?

In the US, the LCCs we have like spirit and Southwest offer low prices but their service is far from terrible. Spirit does the whole no frills thing to make their tickets extremely low but they're service is outstanding. The aircrafts are clean and new, the attendants are always on their game and do a great job, they're the most punctual US carrier, and they have  the youngest fleet, so service is pretty good minus the notorious legroom. Southwest, America's favorite airline, offers low prices and their service is great too. They offer two free bags on all flights and imo they have the friendliest business model.

The LCCs in the US probably get their good rep due to the major carriers not offering anything better. Don't get me wrong, American, Delta, and United are all pretty good airlines but they aren't Singapore or Qantas by any means, therefore the service standard in the US is not that high to begin with. I hear way more good things about our LCCs than our main carriers also, and in most cases LCCs are better. JetBlue for example, is condsidered a LCC but it offers the best service in the nation with seat back entertainment on ALL aircraft, the longest average legroom in the market, and they have a fairly new fleet.

[Zortan]

Umm... Spirit has clean aircraft? I'd beg to differ...

From what I've heard Spirit skimps a bit on the cleaning budget so it's normal to find the safety card or menu stuck together with gum, or some wrappers left in the tray table. Punctuality is good, and I'd agree that they have that down pretty well, and the fleet generally pretty new. I've heard of the best flight attendants on Spirit and the worst as well. It's really up to them tbh - it's not like they're paid to provide great service Sprit's legroom is also so tiny that I'd probably have to upgrade (which I'm sure is their goal) on anything over a couple of hours.

Southwest is pretty good, and their legroom is actually better than JetBlue FYI. JetBlue is pretty average - they could call themselves full-service if they wanted to. The issue with all of this is that the prices are so high. From SEA the cheapest flight I can find round-trip is $138 which is LAS (this was for a random date). There is only a small handful of flights available for under $200, and none of them to the east coast or anywhere far at all.

[fsclips]

Even though I work for an LCC in the real world I like the idea of a full service airline and that is what I want to create here.

Maybe after the reset I will try to create something based on Pan Am with older aircraft. There is something very romantic about flying in the 60s. 

@unk I hope you realise that my posts here are all meant as feedback and not as unnecessary criticism.

The beauty, but also the difficulty with a project like this is that it means different things to different people. 
Everyone wants to create something different and the coding needs to allow for that  
Keep up the great work!

[Unknown98]

I know. Feedback is necessary, just difficult to get it working for all types of airlines. I get it right for LCC's, and carde can't run his premium airline. I get it right for both of those and then full service people complain. lol

So I just made the change to the reputation calculations. It will no longer include reputation ratings of 0 in the average. So if you had some quick flights that had 0 reputation, those will no longer be counted. If you offer different classes on different routes, the routes where you do not offer a particular class will no longer lower the reputation of that class.

Just as an example @Zortan your economy reputation stayed the same at around 7.7% but your premium economy went from 3 something to 13%.

The only issue I foresee with this is, lets say you don't have any business or first class. So your reputation for those will be 0, thus lowering your overall rep (as it is designed to be). You could in theory create a config for business and first, run one flight a week, and now the formula will average that one weekly flight and your overall reputation will jump way up. So what I think I need to do is weight the overall reputation based on the number of flights you operate. Idk what the number could be, perhaps 20 weekly flights needed for a 100% weight on the formula, anything less than that lowers the weight and prevents this loophole. I'm not sure.