Every 30 or 60 minutes

[MikeS]

On very busy city pairs:
Has anyone tested whether it's really better to fly every 30 minutes with one flight vs. every 60 minutes with two flights (departing at same time)?

The 30 min schedule would cannibalize both the prior and upcoming flights while flying twice at 60 min intervals would cannibalize only one flight at a time?
Or does the game really drop cannibalization rules over a certain amount of route pair passenger demand?

Mike

[knobbygb]

I'd say it's always going to be better to fly as many flights as possible when the demand is really there, i.e. total demand divided by number of flights as at least, sat 1.2x the capacity of your aircraft. Remember, in a competitive game, it's not just about how much money YOU make, but how much you can prevent your competitor from making - and then using against you.  It just depends on so many variables though - slot cost and OOB limit being a big one earlier in the game. But later on, I'll quite happily keep adding flights until I'm making one dollar per flight if it makes life more challenging for everybody else! Also it depends if you are chasing stats or overall profit/margin. So... no empirical testing there, just gut feeling.

As for cannibalisation rules - I won't quote the exact figures because a lot of alliance friends have spent time experimenting, but you can indeed fly as close as 5 minute intervals with no penalty when the demand is high enough.  The limit to go from hourly to 55 minutes is a lot lower than you might think so do some experimenting.

[groundbum2]

1500pax/day you can go to 30 with no cannabalization.