good/bad departure/arrival times

[meiru]

Sometimes I see on some routes (GW#4) a distribution of pax between two airlines that is 9:1 even if they fly the same aircrafts... and this seems a bit strange to me. Of course, it can be because of the price and because of the CI/RI, but I'm wondering how much the time affects this and which times (e.g. from 0400-0530 ??) do have which impact. Can we get an official statement on this? I cannot ask the passengers in this game, so I think we have to get this info! I cannot plan my flights correctly if I don't know what correct means.

[Mr.HP]

Sometimes I see on some routes (GW#4) a distribution of pax between two airlines that is 9:1 even if they fly the same aircrafts... and this seems a bit strange to me.

Of course, they don't have the same criteria which are: RI, CI, actual flying (A/C not in maintenance), price, A/C type, frequency, etc...

I think to have 9:1 ratio and frequency is not a factor; then (1) RI and (2) actual flying are the main reasons

[Curse]

I did some very extensive testing in GW#4 and in my experience nearly no two identical times seem to be best. The "best" however seem to be between 11am and 19pm. I have abysmal LF even on flights between 8am departure and 7:30am arrival after a certain point of increased prices while times more in the middle of the day keep stable for longer.

[chiveicrook]

I have a faint recollection that Sami adjusted "less than ideal" times slightly so that the new best early departure is closer to 6-7am than to 5 am as in the past and arriving late between 23-00 is better than leaving between 23-00 and better than arriving very early in the morning.
My memory is not reliable though :-)

[LemonButt]

If you take a scientific approach, it's easy   I am running an all CRJ airline out of GW2 and have tweaked pricing on every route to achieve a ~90% load factor on all flights regardless of time.  Scientific method states that you should control for all variables but the one your testing, so since all factors are equal except pricing, I have a good dataset to use.

I used my ORD-CLT, ORD-LGA, and ORD-DEN routes which all have an RI of 100 and ~10 flights per day with ~90% load factors.  They are all flying the same aircraft, same seating config, same everything--the only difference is departure times (independent variable) and price (dependent variable).  Graphing the results, you can see that there isn't a cliff where demand falls off, but the change is gradual.  It doesn't seem to matter whether you depart at 8am in the morning or 8pm at night--the demand is the same.  The "valley" or absolute worst departure time is around 200 in the morning, however I do not have any flights taking off from 000-150 so the truly worst time could be in there, although 200 makes the most sense because it is halfway between the "dead zone" of 2300-500.

Here is the spreadsheet with 3 different sheets.  I broke out departures from my home base and remote airports because there is a small bonus for "home airlines" which would be the only factor left to skew the data.  The third sheet is the combined scatterplot below: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SyKgdEdV2sLaEEyjDMvt-hZq2TDlZWs8xgvx2YEE5yg/edit?usp=sharing

[Curse]

@ LemonButt

That's my experience. However, if you increase prices further (and I talk up to +94%!) the pattern I described will show up. Too bad AirwaySim doesn't provide us more information about this. Not being able to ask passengers is a huge problem...