Passenger Aircraft Preference?

[LOT767]

You guys are silly, passengers don't care. Nobody spends all night on travel websites being nitpicky because their flight is on an Airbus or Boeing. Nobody cares, after about 10 flights flying is a miserable chore that you have to do for whatever reason. Price, price, price...... The end, can we close this topic already? 90% of the people at an airport don't even know what a A380 is let alone care.

[snowmen10]

How you can disagree with me on this when I am a professional in that field and got tens of thousands of passenger feedbacks analyzed and evaluated is beyond me.

And you believe these tens of thousands of passengers know the differences between a widebody and narrowbody...

In the present time, do you know how many passengers prefer to take new narrowbody 737-900 than old widebody A310? Do passengers really say no to narrowbody 757-300 than widebody A300? Come on... how many travellers do you expect them to tell the differences between 757 and A300 or 737-900 and A310?

Another example is, do people prefer siting upper deck 747 in economic (which is narrowbody because it's 3-3) than main deck 3-4-3? I believe you can answer this one. Personally I choose upper deck 747 ANYTIME, wether in business class or economic class. But I also believe nobody even ask when they order tickets.

I don't want to be sound like disrespectful to your profession or something. If indeed these tens of thousands of passengers in your studied know the differences between widebody and narrowbody, and will indeed choose old A310 over new 737-900, A300 over 757-300, lower 747 over upper 747 on any range/flight time (even less than 3 hours flight) when they purchase tickets. Then I own you an apology.

[Infinity]

And you believe these tens of thousands of passengers know the differences between a widebody and narrowbody...

Well when a customer writes how much better he liked the cairo run on the 747 compared to the A321, I frankly don't know if he knows the 747 is called a widebody, but I know and that is sufficient for that matter.
I know they prefer certain aircraft and they are all widebodies.
Passengers do care for the equipment they fly on way more than you think. Not only aircraft freaks but especially first time fliers are very aware of which aircraft they fly on, the safety record its got and some other stuff.

[snowmen10]

Well when a customer writes how much better he liked the cairo run on the 747 compared to the A321, I frankly don't know if he knows the 747 is called a widebody, but I know and that is sufficient for that matter.

So you mean if the same run is flight by a widebody DC-10 compared to a new A321, he will still choose DC-10... ? (Sorry that I have to pick one of the most hateful plane by traveler back in the day by 2-5-2)

[JumboShrimp]

JumboShrimp - Your attitude towards other people and their opinions seems a 'tad' arrogant to me.

Someone is not a fool because he has an opinion different from yours, your opinion is not the gospel.

It may be an old fashioned way to call a person fooled by marketing a "fool".  The new fashion pushed by various consumer advocates is to call the person a "victim".

I am a marketing professional, and I can exclusively reveal the following fact to you:

Like nuclear weapons, marketing is an evil that was innevitably going to happen.  Maybe I should just make peace with this fact....

Good marketing can not make a bad product the most successful on the market. Apple products are no doubt successful due to perfect marketing, but they are also because they are good products and not some crap. There is a reason the other companies are copying Apple.

There are certain quantities that can be measured objectively.  When it comes to performance of computer hardware and software, there is wide suite of tests.  There was a point in time in Apple's lifetime (before Macs became PCs with Apple OS) when Macs were just a complete garbage.  Not just edged, but leapfrogged by PCs in every category.  At this low point of existance, the cult of Mac fools that Apple marketing has cultivated for decades is what helped Apple survive and be able to fund its future.

Apple products today are fine, some great, I am not speaking of present.  I am speaking of Apple's fruity past, when Apple was selling a different fruit: lemons...  Marketing saved Apple, but it did so by selling consumers lemons, while charging them premium price....

Good marketing can make the difference between a fair market share and market leadership, it cannot turn crap into gold.
Some of this can be projected into the airline industry. Have you never noticed airline ads almost always showing widebody aircraft even if they are only a very small fraction of the fleet? The newest Delta ad is an example for that, showing a 747. The newest Lufthansa ad is showing an A380. I could go on forever. This is all due to the customer preferring a widebody over a narrowbody, for whatever reason.
Some of this is irrational, some is not.
No center bins are something that add to a more lofty feeling, that is why premium cabins often don't have them. In economy you just can't do that. Also leg room can't just be upgauged, so aircraft manufacturers must find other ways to increase passenger comfort. There probably is no cabin part that manages to create a better feel than the nose section of the 747, but that is my personal feeling towards it.
All I can say is that from the data my clients have collected it is more than clear that widebodies generate a more positive customer feedback if placed on the same route as a narrowbody, an example for this is the Europe to Cairo run which has had a switch from widebody to narrowbody, I think I can spare us the details, the feedback was disastrous. Given the outdated seating product on the replaced widebody, this was most definitely not due to the lack of seatback IFE or the likes. It was simply due to the much narrower cabin and claustrophobic feel that such a long flight created for some passengers in the long and narrow cabin of the A321.
Some US-Airlines have entered a viscious circle by adding 757 to long haul routes, they scare the passengers off and now can't be easily replaced because the customer base has scattered towards foreign carriers offering a more comfortable experience on the same route.

As far as my own preference for narrowbodies, I hope I made it clear that it was my own personal preference, supported by my knowledge that is superior to an average airline customer, and by the fact that I am taller than an average customer.

As far as claustrophobic feel, using some common sense, rather than marketing BS, can an A321 really make you calustrophobic?  The cabin area is larger than most people's apartment - and I mean 1 or 2 bedrooms, living room kitchen, 1 or 2 bathrooms all combined.  Is it rational to feel claustrophobic in this sized space?  It is really the size of your own personal space that makes people claustrophobic (including me to some extend).  Window and isle seats can partially relief this feeling.  And, as I said before, your chances of getting an isle or window are lower on a widebody than narrowbody.  So a rational person (myself) prefers a narrowbody.

If you survey 100 people and majority will say that 2 + 2 is something other than 4, you have to cater to these customers, even promoting more myths, if that's what works....  I am just going to continue to be appalled by all this (if it is ok with you   )

No need to be amazed, I know that already and have professional data on it. What you are saying is true, and if you had read carfully you would have noticed that I have already acknowledged that price is the single most important factor in passenger choice, the problem for this game is that a one-stop has the exact same suggested price as a direct flight, a case in which in reality nobody would even bother with the one-stop flight.
I am aware that yield management in reality is far too complex to model in a game, but if we say it's mean values it still is totally unrealistic.

In AWS 1.3, nobody transfers flights.  The next version will have passenger connectivity.  So it may be a good idea to re-evaluate this then.

As far as where the "problem" is, I just want to re-iterate that it the fact that frequency outweighs all the other variables in passenger preferences in current version of AWS.  Lots of threads get started and can go for a while discussing various symptoms (narrow body vs. wide body, tech stop vs direct, lack of price elasticity, premium seating quality that makes too little difference etc.)  These are all symptoms...

[Sami]

Like I have said elsewhere, when and if the system is changed, there is still no way to please everyone. Some "professional" says this, some "layman" says that, and some aviation enthusiast says the third thing is right. Oh well. But since the discussion is obviously going nowhere, thread is locked until further. Any comments and actual suggestions to the feature rq forum.