Hello again,
I my CI was sitting at about 30 and now that I'm making a little bit of money I decided to put more money into marketing. I tripled the amount of money I'm putting into marketing but it's been a couple weeks and I haven't see any change in my CI at all. Is this normal? Does it usually move this slowly?
I was told once that CI is just a function of how money money you spend per week on marketing. That is to say that it doesn't matter whether it's tv, newspaper, etc. Is that correct?
Cheers,
Chax
This game is all about patience.
2-3 weeks is a very short period of time to expect additional money put into marketing to produce an immediate visible result.
CI takes any company years to grow and I expect that it is no different here.
Many say that it is all about putting more $$$ in to increase marketing regardless of the type of marketing, but then there are a few threads where players have said that they get better results by ensuring they have a good variety of marketing types.
Best Game Tip - spend your free time reading many many many posts, as a lot of questions will be answered.
PS - and not everyone that posts an 'answer' is a guru at what they are talking about (me included) so when you read responses take some with a grain of salt and some as gems....best to see who has good game from to see if their responses are for you.
May I ask how much money you spend on marketing before and now? If you think it's sensitive data, please feel free to send it via PM to me.
If you really tripled your expenses and if one remembers you started at (really low) 30 CI, you should have seen some improvement after one ingame week, at least a small push of 1-2 percent points if not more.
It doesn't matter if you spend money on TV or Internet or something else or if you make marketing around your airport or in the whole world. What counts is how many dollars you spend for marketing.
CI is related to the percentage of income you spend. For the CIs up to 50 10% may be enough, but that depends on how your fleet is performing, that staff is happy and how many destinations you serve. If CI doesn´t move, you will have to spend more. Might be better to have a mix of available campaigns instead of just one or many identical ones.
20 and 30, in my experience with a couple of regional airlines, are "thresholds" which can be held with comparably little funding, but to push ahead you need significantly more investment to go "over the hump". Effects should be noticable in the weeks after by slow, but steady increases of CI.
Quote from: exchlbg on September 22, 2012, 02:22:27 PM
CI is related to the percentage of income you spend.
Nope. Yet alone the fact it depends how many airports your airline serves makes your statement invalid. I ran CI 100 airlines from different places with different sizes and different marketing expenses, going up to 30% in a MT with an extremely huge fleet out of Los Angeles and something about 7.5% in an EuroChallenge.
Basic rule is to spend money and when CI increasing stops but you want to have higher CI, spend more money. Like many things in AirwaySim there's no basic manual or formula that gives you an exact answer.
Quote from: AndiD on September 22, 2012, 02:36:56 PM
....are "thresholds" which can be held with comparably little funding, but to push ahead you need significantly more investment to go "over the hump". ...
Yeah, there are several steps you need lots of money to climb up while maintaining a lower level is easy.
However, if the CI is only 30 and he now spends three times the amount he spent before it should change - maybe slowly, but I it really should increase. There might be an exception of that, for example when he runs a very big airline (but I doubt this with low CI), that's why I hope he tells us how he spent exactly before and now.
Thanks for all the responses!
I don't mind giving the information. I was originally spending about $150,000/week on marketing which kept my CI nicely at 30. Now i'm spending just under $600,000/week and I have yet to even see a slight increase in my CI. Could this possibly be a bug? I have to imagine that tripling my marketing should have had some kind of effect by now. If I don't see a change soon I'll go back down to $150,000/week.
Cheers,
Chax
Oops....I guess I quadrupled it, not tripled it.
How many aircraft does your airline has in service and how many airports do you fly to? Both can be easily seen in the statistics menu https://www.airwaysim.com/game/Info/Stats#StatsRoutes (number of airports served by your airline) https://www.airwaysim.com/game/Info/Stats#StatsAircraft (number of aircraft).
Edit:
I have to steal some candy from kids, so no answer from my side for the next hours.
I'm serving 71 airports with 15 planes.
Ok, you are this rare case I mentioned.
Basically you serve (far) too much destinations for the size of your fleet and due to the factor marketing expenses are heavily attached to number of cities you serve, you have to pay above-average money for it.
If you don't see an increasing in CI, you must spend even more money on marketing (or alternatively reduce the number of airports you serve or get more aircraft to serve the airports better which gains in more profit your airline makes and more money you can spend on marketing).
If you encounter other problems or if thinks aren't clear to you, don't hesitate to tell. There's also the option to allow me (or somebody else) via the mentor system to take a look at your airline if you still feel there's something wrong. Also the mentor system allows to get a mentor at all. ;)
Thanks for the info. I just dropped my marketing back down to $150,000 a week. I'd love to lower the number of airports I serve and increase my flights to each airport but I just don't have the demand. Most of my routes barely have enough demand for one daily flight so it looks like there's not much I can do for now.
Thanks for the help!
Not to burst anyone's bubble here, but all of the old CI rules seem to be out the window with the new pax algorithm. As long as you don't have a negative CI, it doesn't seem to matter that much anymore. RI is far more important than CI when it comes to load factors. In NAC I'm spending $656k/week with $70 million/week in revenue. That is less than 1% of revenue devoted to marketing and I have a CI of 30. My load factors were 75%-85% flying CRJ700/900 and I've since upgraded to CRJ1000, which are cheaper to operate and have more seats, so my load factors have dropped to 65%, but I'm more profitable than ever earning 10% profit margins ($7 million/week on $70 million/week in revenue) with 3 bases. I have 104 aircraft serving 163 airports with 610 route pairs, all of which are in the top 20.
So I think rule of thumb is that unless you are catering to huge amounts of business or first class pax, CI is irrelevant because RI is much more important. Here is a major route (CVG-ORD) that I am competing against 2 high CI airlines:
APB 7x daily with E195, approx 700 seats or 40% of all seats, 45% market share (100 CI)
Dantes 9x daily with Dash-8, approx 600 seats or 36% of all seats, 35% marketshare (80 CI)
Me 4x daily with CRJX, approx 400 seats or 24% of all seats, 20% marketshare (30 CI)
One of my flights is between 000-500 which has a lower load factor, but my three during the day are getting 80-85% load factors including 5 out of 6 business class seats being sold on every flight (on average). This flight has 1700 seats on it with a demand of 900-1000 daily, so as you can see, CI is much less of a factor than it used to be and all the other variables are now much more important.
Quote from: Chaxterium on September 22, 2012, 05:08:58 PM
Thanks for the info. I just dropped my marketing back down to $150,000 a week. I'd love to lower the number of airports I serve and increase my flights to each airport but I just don't have the demand. Most of my routes barely have enough demand for one daily flight so it looks like there's not much I can do for now.
Thanks for the help!
In my NAC airline mentioned above, I average 1.46 flights/day per route pair. You can either serve the dense routes many times daily and have stiff competition or you can serve the thin routes once a day with little to no competition. Most airline go bankrupt because they were using the former strategy versus the latter.
Quote from: LemonButt on September 22, 2012, 05:30:43 PM
In my NAC airline mentioned above, I average 1.46 flights/day per route pair. You can either serve the dense routes many times daily and have stiff competition or you can serve the thin routes once a day with little to no competition. Most airline go bankrupt because they were using the former strategy versus the latter.
That was exactly my plan! 8) The only airlines I've ever been profitable with were based on this strategy. Out of all of my routes, I have competition on maybe 3 or 4.
Curse,please don´t qualify other posts as invalid, especially when you are stating the exact same thing a few posts afterwards.
Seems we all just hit in the dark what CI exactly is about.
Your experiences of running big airlines in the past , most of them LHs from London, doesn´t help much anybody sticking to a regional airline.
I spoke of my experiences, and they are not invalid at all, because serving many single destinations does heavily influence the amount of money
(=percentage of income, which is lower with smaller planes) you have to spend.
Quote from: LemonButt on September 22, 2012, 05:26:30 PM
Not to burst anyone's bubble here, but all of the old CI rules seem to be out the window with the new pax algorithm. As long as you don't have a negative CI, it doesn't seem to matter that much anymore. RI is far more important than CI when it comes to load factors.
I'm having fierce competition on every single route I operate, so I can't try going below 100 right now, but this sounds interesting.
Quote from: exchlbg on September 22, 2012, 09:23:31 PM
...
I'm currently doing my first LHR airline and that's in a Beginner's Game. Please get your facts right whom you are talking to at first.
I understood your post in the way the percent of your revenue or profit you spend is exactly the amount of percentage your CI will increase or decrease. And that's wrong.
Also it wasn't my intention to sound rude. It's the Swiftus-Complex I have to change my tone a bit when I see something incorrect in a help thread and, as I said, your post looked (and looks) in this point still incorrect to me.
Quote from: exchlbg on September 22, 2012, 09:23:31 PM
Seems we all just hit in the dark what CI exactly is about.
Nope. CI is to get business and first class pax in your aircraft and it affects economy class very little, especially above CI 20. It's an absolute value, means if you have CI 80 and your competitor has CI 81 he wins the same way he would win with CI100. Sami statement.
LemonButt is right, too, RI got much more important to gain higher loadfactors, however, the thread opener asked about how to increase CI and not if it's useful or how he should increase his lf.
What is unclear about and that's where you right is how the exact algorithm is. I don't think sami will tell it, so the best way to find out is to try with throwing more and more money in until you received the result you want.
I know how CI is intended to work. I no way I said the % of spent income and CI or LF should be identical.
Sure it´s all about money. But there is no fixed sum you have to spend or fixed number of campaigns you have to start to have a fixed effect.
So I tried to look at it in a more fluent way, the way your campaigns get more expensive when your business grows.
And we both agree in the effect that the number of destinations has on marketing. It´s more expensive. But if you run a regional carrier tied to small routes, you don´t have always the possibility to reduce the number of destinations.With a smaller revenue it takes a bigger % of your income to make CI grow. On the other hand you don´t need a very high CI if you fly without competition and no C/F PAX.
Maybe in connection with the new code CI has a different effect now.
About LHR, it just was a shot into the dark. It´s been a long time since you´ve been around and I just remembered that KING logo tied to something huge flying from major hubs, not to a small regional carrier.
What is the status of your CI troubles, if any?
Quote from: exchlbg on September 23, 2012, 12:30:13 AM
Maybe in connection with the new code CI has a different effect now.
All Sami did was make price more relevant in the pax calculation formula. Since frequency has a cap,
price now, can move more pax then before.
Please remember this:
Route Image dictates how many pax you are allowed on a given route. At RI 100 you can achieve the theoretical
150% maximum on that route.
Company Image dictates how many pax will fly with you
and at what price vs
with or without Competition.
With above said in context, is CI more important or less important? ;)
QuoteQuote from: exchlbg on September 22, 2012, 08:22:27 AM
CI is related to the percentage of income you spend.
Quote from: Curse on September 22, 2012, 02:47:02 PM
Nope. Yet alone the fact it depends how many airports your airline serves makes your statement invalid....ect
QuoteRe: CI - 90 and beyond ?
« From Sigma: Reply #5 on: December 13, 2009, 11:02:52 PM »
The % depends entirely on the number and density of the routes you fly.
This hasn't changed. It does increase based off the size of your company. However, that amount is insignificant compared to the variables Sigma stated.
Quote from: LemonButt on September 22, 2012, 05:26:30 PM
Not to burst anyone's bubble here, but all of the old CI rules seem to be out the window with the new pax algorithm. As long as you don't have a negative CI, it doesn't seem to matter that much anymore. RI is far more important than CI when it comes to load factors .... ect
RI changes were reflected to slow growth, not replace or diminish the CI value. Once RI reaches 100 and stays there, it becomes statistically pointless.
BTW... My question above was directed at you 8)
Talentz
PS: almost forgot...
Quote from: Curse on September 23, 2012, 12:05:50 AM
It's the Swiftus-Complex
Mahahahahaha I swear, you light a fire under him or Sigma and l o o k out! :laugh:
Quote from: Talentz on September 24, 2012, 07:48:12 AM
PS: almost forgot... Mahahahahaha I swear, you light a fire under him or Sigma and l o o k out! :laugh:
Why should I light a fire under Sigma? I really respect him, he has skill, he has knowledge, he is friendly and an addition to AirwaySim and mankind.
To honor the rules I'm not going to say anything about Swiftus here.