City based demand

[JumboShrimp]

I wonder what will be the fate of London City. Crazy opening hours, very limited slots, poor list of aircraft available..... Will be fun to watch. I'm not sure I't set up a base here, anyways, as I did in previous GW3.

Most of the demand it has will be shifted to other airports, if no one has a base there.

[JumboShrimp]

2) No Immigration and customs in RL at LGA so it won't be realistic to have any kind of international flight with the exception of places with pre clearance facilities like YYZ etc.

There are 10s of flights to Canada from LGA.

Maybe the airports (in general) could have a flag "International" to specify if the airport has customs / immigration facilities.

[gazzz0x2z]

Most of the demand it has will be shifted to other airports, if no one has a base there.

Of course, but will it happen? Will people go there anyways? I was not asking about the game mechanics(though your answer seem to fit with what Sami said). I was wondering about the player's behaviour. Will they all jump on airports with the most slots? Will they spread out? Will some of them try alternate strategies? It will be interesting, at least.

In current GW4, the Heathrow-Charles-de-Gaulle line is overcrowded with A320. Because slots in Heathrow are so costly, it would make no sense outfrequencing them with regional jets. now, imagine it switches to city-based demand. A clever smaller player may try to land a few ejets between LCY & Beauvais. And steal some of the demand. Maybe.

Which leads to another question : how to make all this readable to the player? When I was attacked on the Fuerteventura-Las Palmas line, it was easy for me to see it. I adjusted my pricing and schedules accordingly. But when 2 other airports are involved, how can the player sense he is under attack?

[Sami]

It will be interesting to see.

And to all these comments that "this airport doesn't have this or that, and that's why a route cannot be flown" .. Airports will have NOTHING to do with the route demand. There are no differences on what's a "domestic" and what's "international" airport and so forth. It will depend on what the players wish to do.

Which leads to another question : how to make all this readable to the player? When I was attacked on the Fuerteventura-Las Palmas line, it was easy for me to see it. I adjusted my pricing and schedules accordingly. But when 2 other airports are involved, how can the player sense he is under attack?

You can see on your route the current demand and the maximum demand. If they differ much, or the gap between them grows, you know some other airport is stealing it. I could possibly add a small info section that would have links to the other airports' route planning pages on the competing sectors (but that might not always be accurate so might not too..).

[Sami]

Comments on how to display the demand figures in a nice way?

The data what needs to be displayed:

a) Potential full demand (3 classes)
b) Current demand (3 classes)
c) My supply (3 classes)
d) Other airline supply
( e) Temporary demand, from events )

The current chart format starts to be a bit unclear with all this data already. The charting application is also causing limits to how it can be displayed... 

But let me know if you have any thoughts.

Possibly dropping the "potential demand" bar alltogether and showing it as a sort of trendline in the background only (as that full demand potential is rarely reachable completely; it happens only when this airport catches ALL demand from the adjacent airports on this route-pair .. so basically almost never).

[gazzz0x2z]

(.../...)Possibly dropping the "potential demand" bar alltogether and showing it as a sort of trendline in the background only (as that full demand potential is rarely reachable completely; it happens only when this airport catches ALL demand from the adjacent airports on this route-pair .. so basically almost never).

I like the idea. But it won't be rare for airports alone in their catchment area, I guess. Bermuda comes to mind

[NovemberCharlie]

Maybe leave out the separate column for potential demand and add a bar on top of the current demand in a contrasting (blue in this case?) colour...
Though this works for me too

[JumboShrimp]

Possibly dropping the "potential demand" bar alltogether and showing it as a sort of trendline in the background only (as that full demand potential is rarely reachable completely; it happens only when this airport catches ALL demand from the adjacent airports on this route-pair .. so basically almost never).

I would also like to see the supply from the other airports, which is now just too many bars for one screen.

I think it would be the best to split between 2 screens and a link to switch between them.

Default would be the pinned airport to airport info.  In most cases, that is identical to Total.  One indication - single bar - on this page, indicating percentage of total that this page represent would be all that is needed.

[Sami]

Default would be the pinned airport to airport info.  In most cases, that is identical to Total.  One indication - single bar - on this page, indicating percentage of total that this page represent would be all that is needed.

Not sure if I quite undersood?  (the last part especially)

[JumboShrimp]

Not sure if I quite undersood?  (the last part especially)

View 1.

What I meant is that the default view should identical to what we see now in the current version, but in the new system, it would represent demand Airport to Airport demand, that is currently pinned to the airport pair.  The only difference would be additional single bar indicating what percentage of Total demand we are looking at.  The height of this bar should be equal to the height of the highest bar on the bar graph.  The full length would represent 100%, and within it, a shorter bar would indicate the actual percentage.  This would make it easy on the eyes.

So the only addition is a single bar (not 7 day bar) that would represent percentage of Total Demand (***).  IMO, 99% of the time, this is all the user needs to see.  The percentage tells you in very simplified way what the Total demand is, without creating too much clutter and confusion.


View 2.

If the player wants to see details on the Total, there would be an icon/link to click to switch to Total Demand and Total Supply View (including all combinations of airports. serving the catchment area.

If I am not being clear, let me know, I will try to draw it.

[JumboShrimp]

(***) Side note:

I am not quite sure how the data is modeled, and how easy it is to figure out the Total Demand.

The Total Demand should represent the Total Demand of catchment area to catchment area.  All the squares in one catchment area to all the squares in the other airport catchment area.  I am not sure how readily available that info is, and how quickly it can be retrieved.

The pinned demand of all the combinations of the airports may be slightly inaccurate.  For example, if we have:
- Airports A and B, 50 miles apart
- Airports X and Y, also 50 miles apart.
- Distance between AB and XY is 1000 miles.

Airports A and B have slightly different catchment areas.  If we just sum the pinned demand (for quick retrieval), we may be slightly overestimating the Total Demand,.  The catchment area of A+B is greater than A, X + Y is greater than X.  So the total demand of A+B to X+Y would be more than Total Demand of Catchment area A to B.

I think the Total view will require some work and fine tuning.  And rather than this being a show stopper, we could get off the ground and testing without the very detailed Total View.  All we would need to get started is some quick and dirty calculation to figure out the Percentage Bar in View 1.

[JumboShrimp]

Another note on the Total Demand View (and why it should be separate view):

It would be helpful to see all the combinations of airports it represents.  So for example, NYC to Dallas would represent:
JFK-DFW
JFK-DAL
LGA-DFW
LGA-DAL
EWR-DFW
EWR-DAL

switching to the Total view should list these combinations as links, so that the player could examine them in detail.

[Sami]

The problem with the chart system is that I cannot for example make a chart that has the total demand as one series and then Mo-Su weekdays in separate series in the same chart. That's why the total demand is currently shown for every weekday (which is unnecessary). At least with this multi-series stacked chart that is used ..

That's why probably the best would be to show the total potential demand as a horizontal line spanning through the whole chart instead of a bar, I think that's doable.  http://www.fusioncharts.com/charts/  &  http://www.fusioncharts.com/charts/msstackedcolumn2d_1/


The total potential demand is calculated in the demand calculation sequence. It simply sums up everything that the airport can catch and saves it to database. Showing the other nearby airport data could be possible too - system would just look what squares this airport catches, and then looks up any other airport catching any of these squares and shows their data.

[JumboShrimp]

The total potential demand is calculated in the demand calculation sequence. It simply sums up everything that the airport can catch and saves it to database.

That's excellent.  So getting a percentage pinned to the airport pair should be easy.  I think all the player needs to know is that there is more demand than he is looking at (the pinned airport to airport demand)

Showing the other nearby airport data could be possible too - system would just look what squares this airport catches, and then looks up any other airport catching any of these squares and shows their data.

How about this idea:

A new chart that would include the percentage of total demand (let's say JFK-DFW) that I was talking about originally, but in addition all the other airport pairs that are serving this Total Demand between JFK-DFW.  This could be a horizontal bar chart showing following info:

JFK-DFW 35%
LGA-DFW 25%
EWR-DFW 20%
JFK-DAL 10%
LGA-DAL 5%
EWR - DAL 5%
HPN - DFW 3%
ISP - DFW 2%
etc.

Each could potentially be a link to the supply demand chart between these airports.

[alexgv1]

I'd like to see what the total potential demand looks like as a trend line. If it works well then simplest would be to go with that.

[JumboShrimp]

Total Potential demand will not change very much.  Some 3% growth...

I think a more interesting would be a trend line of how the Total Potential demand is allocated between airport pairs.  That has a potential to have some swings as players add flights, bankruptcies etc.

In other words the Total Potential Demand between catchment areas surrounding, say JFK and DFW will not change much, but if another player adds flights between LGA and DFW, the demand that is pinned to JFK-DFW will go down, demand pinned to LGA-DFW will go up.

[11Air]

Seems to me we just need to see City Demand and Supply as that shows the need for more flights (seats).  A blue line (reach for the sky) above the supply columns seems fine as an indicator that there is more demand or not.

Special events could then be a red line above the blue line (red letter days with explanatory text of dates and level of demand as currently) but this short term demand can be met in two ways by airlines, a hike in prices or provision of extra seats.

[ezzeqiel]

I don't think the demand should be shown between airport pairs, but within city pairs...

Players can ask their marketing deparment to estimate the demand between "London and Paris" and that should be shown in the charts.

Then how that demands splits between different airports should be the players job to figure out.

If your same priced flight out of Stansted gets half LFs than your flight out of Heathrow, then players should figure that out, just as they figure out why 2am flights are empty while 9am are full...



Sadly, that won't happen if the system is not dinamic. RL demand don't switch from airports "gradually", they just go to "edreams.com" or "priceline.com" and book the best fare in relation to "price, airport, time, etc, etc".


Proposal: everyday the system has a city pair demand (not airport, but city). Then it searches between all possible direct flights + connections, and assign demand according to how the system scored the flights (more points to direct 9am flights out of close to the city airports, less pointg to connecting flights out of far airports; more points to cheap flights, less to expensive, etc)

[qunow]

HND-SFO getting no demand as all is unrealistic as hell given the airport pair is served by 777 double daily in real life.

[ArcherII]

HND-SFO getting no demand as all is unrealistic as hell given the airport pair is served by 777 double daily in real life.

When the demand was designed in AWS (2006?), it used the available data of that time. HND has recently opened to international traffic.

Argentina also has an awful domestic demand, unlike RL. But that is probably due to the lack of official statistics at that time.