Strategy for high demand routes

[tavyturean]

Let's say there's a route on which the demand can fill five of your planes. And let's say it's the beginning of the GW, so you're confident no other company will come in and take all that away from you.
How does one set ticket prices knowing you're going to have another flight to the same destination soon? Or do you fly twice a day from the start?
As a noob i think there are a few tactics, of which I'm sure only one is good, but I don't know which one:
1. Fly once. Let the plane fill up and do not change the ticket price. Once it gets to 90% open a new flight with the same price and so on. Increase prices only when all planes are full and you don't want to add new flights to that destination.
2. Open two or three flights from the start at the same price and increase it as they start to fill.
3. Open one flight and increase the price once it gets to 90%. Keep raising until it stabilizes at 90%. Then open another flight at lower prices. And repeat.
What do you guys think us the best apriach gor this?

[schro]

You don't want to serve more than 20-30% of demand on a given route until RI has sufficiently risen. You'll want to start with 1 flight per day per route and increase the prices as RI will allow. Once you've run out of routes that you can load to 20-30% of demand, go back and start adding second flights.

[knobbygb]

But the route image rises more quickly when you have two flights vs. one. And the speed it rises depends a LOT on your CI. So it really depends what other routes are available that might make even more money. Remember that having multiple flights on the same route keeps staffing costs down which is really important early on.

At the beginning of a game, even when my CI is low, I would put two flights on such a route and use them as my x6/x7 maintenance flights to fully schedule two aircraft. Since I know I will need at least two flights anyway, this avoids too many changes later on. I suspect that with demand 2.5x supply (with two aircraft), the flights would almost be profitable from day one. After the first two flights, I would then probably concentrate on other routes and raise the prices before adding a third flight. With that sort of demand, no competition and once the RI is 100%, you could probably go +70% on the prices which will make a LOT more money than adding more flights.

One thing I'd note is that your supposition "you're confident no other company will come in and take all that away from you" is totally unrealistic. Somebody WILL, I promise you. With demand 5x your typical aircraft size, this is going to be a hub-hub flight and your window for zero-competition is likely to be game-months at the maximum. Having more flights from the start MIGHT be more likely to put others off and look elsewhere first (well, maybe a little but that's just a guess) but limiting it to just two would protect you from having to make big changes later.

[tyteen4a03]

I diversify my portfolio.

[Zombie Slayer]

To reply to Knobby, I have observed the opposite. 1x vs 2x RI seem to rise the same speed. It seems to me to be more of a flown/not flown checker as opposed to how many times it flew.

[JumboShrimp]

To reply to Knobby, I have observed the opposite. 1x vs 2x RI seem to rise the same speed. It seems to me to be more of a flown/not flown checker as opposed to how many times it flew.

Yup.  And flown 1x per week = flown 7x per week = flown 280x per week as far as RI.

[gazzz0x2z]

To reply to Knobby, I have observed the opposite. 1x vs 2x RI seem to rise the same speed. It seems to me to be more of a flown/not flown checker as opposed to how many times it flew.

OTOH, fly twice a week, and your RI will stay low forever.

[wilian.souza2]

I've had many flights that managed to reach 100 even being flown 1x/day. It can rise slower because of the times that the route is not flown due to aircraft maintenance or cancellations, but to remedy this you can schedule 2 flights/week on 2 different aircraft and RI will reach 100 at the same pace it was flown every day.

[knobbygb]

To reply to Knobby, I have observed the opposite. 1x vs 2x RI seem to rise the same speed. It seems to me to be more of a flown/not flown checker as opposed to how many times it flew.

I stand corrected then. It's something I'll have to experiment with. Maybe it's a behaviour I think I noticed years ago and it's changed since.