The current price management page and tools are still from the "old" user interface, the last ones remaining, and there has been planning going on for a longer time now already to make a large overhaul to these systems. This update of the price management will be similar to the scale of the accounting update - it's a major upgrade affecting all users. This thread is made to discuss the details (if something is missing) and to give preliminary information about the update.
What will change?
- The whole concept of price management. It will be dubbed as 'revenue management' in the future as that's the more correct term. The basic idea is to maximize the airline's ticket income. Currently most users are not managing their prices, there is no active price competition, and generally players will be happy to accept 99% load factors and losing revenue.
- The concept will be slightly similar to staff systems: Players will have the possibility to manage everything manually, or they can have their staff do everything, or split the work (partly manual / partly automatic).
- For manual management there will be a set of powerful tools to search/filter routes and easily multi-manage the prices there.
- For automatic management you will have the option to guide your staff according to your wishes.
- You can freely choose also a split between these two options where you manage part of your routes manually and let the staff handle the rest if you wish (useful for large airlines with some key routes).
- The whole concept of 'default prices' will be removed. If you are running manual revenue/price management you will still have advice on 'proper'/'reasonable' prices given by your staff, similar to used a/c pricing advisor. This is a range of values and 'accuracy' again depends on the quality of your staff on that department.
How it works in practise?
When opening a new route the current pricing dialog at the editor is replaced as follows:
a) choose if you wish this route's prices to be managed automatically or manually
- manually: opens the current pricing dialogs with staff's price suggestions and possibility to change them
- automatically: shows the pricing dialog (like with manual settings) and allows you to change/input the starting prices, but also gives you the options for automatic staff's guidance (ie. aim for max. LF, balanced, max. profit, or certain LF%), this will be the revenue automation's future target
Done!
b) Route is now open, and if you wish to do changes:
- if on manual you can individually adjust this routes's prices by setting the desired $$ price for each class, or adjust the prices by % up/down - like today. You can do this one route at a time or by selecting several routes at once - like today. For manual pricing there will be a new page for price management with lots of search/filters to make it easier (ie. search routes with LF>90%, select all, raise prices by 10%).
- if on automatic the route will fly on the first given prices for a week-two to gain enough information. Then the revenue management staff will bit by bit change the prices if needed to achieve your requested target. The changes are made gradually (ie. small changes to prices once a week or so) and all the changes are based on the history (LF/sales) of this individual route; it does not try to project the future. The staff will make the changes towards the goal you have set (max LF % for example) but their efficiency will again be depending on the morale/number of that staff group. The automation will also have certain limits and it will not try to push the prices too low for example (these are to be determined).
c) If you wish to do changes to the management mode:
- from manual to automatic price management: can be changed from the route info page, or multiple routes at once. Again you'll be given the options to guide your staff.
- from automatic to manual: making any manual price adjustments will drop the route from the staff automation (with clear info of this), or you can just click and drop it with the current prices set by the automation (= no further changes).
d) On settings page you will have the options to choose the defaults for all these options to make it quicker. On admin side there will be also a global game-wide setting to disallow the usage of automated pricing (needed for some special game worlds).
User interface
The revenue management page will be a completely new one. It will have basically two parts, a company wide price management and route level management.
The global part allows you to make changes affecting all your routes:
- For routes under automated pricing: give orders to your staff to change the targets. I.e. set all routes so that they'd achieve maximum profits.
- For routes under manual pricing: the same tools as now, +/- % or +/- $ on prices (per class). There will NOT be a global 'reset all' button.
- Transfer all routes to automatic/manual price management.
The route level management looks a bit similar to route management page, partly overlapping:
- It lists all your routes showing the pricing info.
- You can search the routes with various filters. Filters would be at least: free text search, base, fleet, LF, route type (dom/sh/lh), departure time, price management type (auto/manual). Of the search results you can then select all, select one, or select multiple routes and adjust their prices. The adjustment options will be: setting price freely (text input for $), +/- %, +/- certain amount of $ (all per travel class, or all together).
- If a route is under automatic pricing it shows up on all search results too, and you can on this page adjust the targets of the management (ie. do you wish the route pricing to be targeted towards max LF for example). Or you can here too change the route from automatic management back to manual or vice versa.
The route management page will have the same pricing setting tools but current filters (= the price management page will have filters and data for its particular purpose but the prices can be adjusted elsewhere too).
On route details page:
- Again the possibility to adjust prices or the automation's targets.
- Possibly a 'log' of what price changes have been done; however undecided yet (depends on the size of the data).
Price profiles
One item currently still undecided is the introduction of 'price profiles'. Currently there is only one price for each class, but to improve realism the prices per class could be split into several parts. For example 20% of Y class' seats would be sold at $100, 60% at $150 and the rest 20% at $250 - in this order.
Implementing this to the user interface is on the one hand simple, but on the other hand could complicate things too much. We can have a set of pre-created pricing profiles which would be simply: "sell x% of the seats at y% of the price set", and the users can create their own profiles too.
Basically this would mean that if we (ourself or automation) sets the routes Y class base price at $100, and our price profile selected for the route says 20% at 80% price, 60% at 100% price and 20% at 150% price, the final prices would be: 20% of seats sold at $80, 60% at $100 and 20% at $150..
Then later the user could simply adjust this pricing profile (which can be chosen for many routes) to increase the amount of 'cheap seats' on these routes for example.
Adjusting the background seat sale and allocation calculation for this is a questionmark still, and the complication of the user interface and generally making things more complicated is something that doesn't sound good. So for the time being this part is not being actively planned.
Target for this feature is during this autumn. The implementation will be possibly in two levels, first the new manual pricing tools and then the revenue management automation.
Do you see anything missing from the interface or from the general concept? I may have forgotten to write down something too..
Topic: Revenue management update - preliminary information (Read 4496 times)
