Competitors' pricing

[jamestbailey]

Is there any way I can see what other airlines are charging on a particular route? If so, how?
Many thanks.

[Kontio]

No.

[altmants]

i think each airline should have the option to "reveal" its fares. I want everyone to see my fares sometimes even if i can't see theirs.

[ekaneti]

no, I dont want fares to be publicly available. We have enough problems with reckless competition. If fares were available for everyone to see pretty soon fares would go to $1

[TheRightSide]

no, I dont want fares to be publicly available. We have enough problems with reckless competition. If fares were available for everyone to see pretty soon fares would go to $1

Very well put. I'm glad its like this and hope it stays this way. Keeps it intresting.

[samomuransky]

no, I dont want fares to be publicly available. We have enough problems with reckless competition. If fares were available for everyone to see pretty soon fares would go to $1

No, it wouldn't. If anyone tried it this way, he will bankrupt.


I'm for showing prices once we will be able to set service level and price will be less important.

[Lankygit]

We can see competitors prices in real life... why not here? Sure it will cut profitability but it would be good to know your prices are actually competitive.

[Curse]

My experience is, price isn't the main factor for pax choosing your airline.

I started two days ago some new routes which are served by other airlines since 2-3 game years. Now after this two days, a route image of ~50-70 and a company image higher then theirs I have market shares 40-60% and there are two to three flights a day missing (lack of planes on my side) - with standard (= game set) prices since the first day.

Higher company image, new and good maintenanced planes (in this case I use brand new A321/A320 and my competitors (older) MD90, B752, B733, B734) and at high competition standard seats will give you market shares. Certainly prices are one more point, but it's the only one of this points which makes your planes profitable (or not).


So why seeing competitors prices? Either you set YOUR prices (which gains you profit) or you will kick somebody with low prices, then you set extreme low prices.

[Sigma]

We can see competitors prices in real life... why not here? Sure it will cut profitability but it would be good to know your prices are actually competitive.

Because this isn't real-life.

There isn't a real risk to running your company into the ground -- no one's really putting 50,000 people out of a job, no one's risking any jailtime for irresponsible management of a company, etc.  There isn't a Wall Street that would freak the hell out and basically stop your entire cashflow and kill your company if your profit went from super-high to deep negative overnight.  There aren't regulatory agencies that say you can't run a route for free just to kill the competition.  There aren't shareholders that will yank all their stock the second you post a huge loss due to cutting fares to $1.  And so on and so forth.

Ask yourself why companies don't post $1 fares all the time in real-life.  And then ask yourself if any of those factors can be demonstrated in this game with any real amount of fidelity.  Make it so everyone can see pricing, and it's just one giant race to the bottom.  Sure, you could argue that's all it really is anyway, but making pricing visible makes that race about 1000 times faster.

And profits tend to be so incredibly high in this game that after just a few game-years I could get away with charging $0 fares on every single route, for the next 5 years before worrying about going bankrupt.  That's not even remotely realistic.  Talk about market power if such a thing happened in real-life.  But in reality, profits are so tight, that even if you could get away (regulatory-wise) with $1 fares on a given route for an extended period of time, the effect of doing that on just a single route would impact the bottom-line so much that it would be worthy of mention on an SEC filing.

[dubAUT]

My experience is, price isn't the main factor for pax choosing your airline.

Since you're running a 200+ fleet and the reputation of your company is quite good: Pax will choose for your flights.

BUT: If you've just started with a new airline, maybe on a smaller airport (since there have to be also services) you need to put down the prices to get pax. I think for new and small airlines prices does matter - a lot.

What about you?

[Curse]

Increasing Image is easier if your company is small and fleet size is no matter for pax choosing an airline. But I forgot to add one point in the last posting - time of flight (and daily flight).

New airlines starting at small airports often use new leased or, if they start late in the game, not so old used leased (<3y) planes.

But yes, it's a good thing to lower prices for the first month by 10-20%. But this doesn't depend on the size of your airline etc.

Quick facts again:
- prices
- time of flight (6:30?-23:00 is the best)
- how often the route is served by you
- jet > prop
- smaller plane > bigger plane
- image of the plane (Airbus > Tupolev)
- age of plane
- condition of the plane
- route image
- company image
- seat configuration (quality)
- punctuality/flight cancellations

[schro]

We can see competitors prices in real life... why not here? Sure it will cut profitability but it would be good to know your prices are actually competitive.

Actual prices in real life are not as transparent as you think they are.  Fares and inventory are constantly changing, and even though there are published RASM and CASM numbers in the US, any variety of methods can be employed to skew the stats to obfuscate the data (i.e. how you allocate revenue and costs between feeder/regional flights to international flights).

Sure, you can go on an airline's website and find the fare at a point in time, but what you don't know is what fares sell at what price, which is what really matters.  At the end of the day, other airlines get the general sense for what average prices are being charged for a route and that data is presented through the "default" price that is available for our routes.  There are also price floors instituted to limit the amount of damage a $0 fare can do to the market, and the demand/selection model for passengers cause them to become less price sensitive once you're below about 25% of average (i.e. the difference between a $25 and $50 fare on a route with a $150 default isn't significant).

The other thing with this game is that we're simply dictating the AVERAGE fare charged - anything more would be too much micromanagement - do you really want to decide how many seats of each flight to sell at what price given a very complex demand model?  If you did, find a revenue management position at a real airline and you can do that all day long...

[altmants]

Like i said, if you want to keep your prices secret, so be it.

But there should be an option for an airline to "release published fares" (Only if they want to).

So Lets say 4 Airlines Serve LHR to JFK. 3 of those airlines can hide their fares. But If i want to show mine, i can click the settings and everyone can see what I'm charging.

[Kontio]

Like i said, if you want to keep your prices secret, so be it.

But there should be an option for an airline to "release published fares" (Only if they want to).

So Lets say 4 Airlines Serve LHR to JFK. 3 of those airlines can hide their fares. But If i want to show mine, i can click the settings and everyone can see what I'm charging.

Why would you want to publish your fares?

[altmants]

There are plenty of reasons.

especially for rubbing in someone's face that i can charge 10% over the standard and still capture more market share than his 50% reduced pricing.

[Kontio]

There are plenty of reasons.

especially for rubbing in someone's face that i can charge 10% over the standard and still capture more market share than his 50% reduced pricing.

PM?

[knutm1980]

PM?

Like any real airline would do, publish them. In AWS, that would be a dashing press release. Some have done it already.

[Sigma]

There are plenty of reasons.

especially for rubbing in someone's face that i can charge 10% over the standard and still capture more market share than his 50% reduced pricing.

That would cause a lot more problems than anything else.

Since price sensitivity is so far down on the passenger demand model in AWS, people would be confused, frustrated, even mad that, despite huge drops in pricing, passengers still didn't want to fly their airline.

Particularly when the game gives so few, if any, indicators as to why passengers do or do not like your airline, route, or flight.

[Kontio]

That would cause a lot more problems than anything else.

Since price sensitivity is so far down on the passenger demand model in AWS, people would be confused, frustrated, even mad that, despite huge drops in pricing, passengers still didn't want to fly their airline.

Particularly when the game gives so few, if any, indicators as to why passengers do or do not like your airline, route, or flight.

We would get a flood of enquiries and "bug reports" as to why don't I get all the passengers on my seats even though I'm undercutting the competition by $1.

[knutm1980]

A lot of people are willing to pay extra money for a real airline versus 'less' for alot of the pirate airlines out there. Any sensible/frequent flyer knows this.

Though it would be interesting to see a proper budget airline operate. Dirt cheap prices for the seat but charging for everything else like check in, breathing whilst in air, etc, etc and flying to non descript airports whilst still remaining profitable and stealing customers away from the larger more expensive airports.