Blocking the Seats

Hello fellow airline directors,

We are happy to announce that we have started implementing the last new feature for the next version: the economics behind ticket sales. Up until now we had a simplified formula doing this calculation. In the next version passengers will check what flights are available to them and see what flight best suits their preferences. Passengers will compare departure and arrival times, your IFE and IFS, flight frequency, and so on. Overall, you won't notice the depth in the formula much if you're the only airline operating the route, but if there is competition the passengers will select their preferred flight based on many factors. This improves the competition and will eventually force the AI (and you) to operate more realistic networks.



As we said last week, we're also improving the cabin configurer. The main visual improvement we made is that seat maps now scale to fit the screen so that you can see the whole cabin at a glance rather than having to scroll. Other updates include: the option to set cabin configurations for multiple airliners of the same type at once, saving configurations or individual seat settings, and the actual implementation of blocked seats.



The blocked seats previously was implemented as a dummy setting, but it didn't do anything. For the casual (non aviation geek) players we'll shortly explain what we mean by a blocked seat. A blocked seat is a quick and cheap way to improve the passenger's experience by blocking a seat between two other seats. This is usually done by turning the middle seat into a table. (source: airtransat.com) You'd usually find this set up on short haul flights in Premium Economy Class or higher.



As we have written in an earlier update we have worked on country relations. This caused some issues with the performance, so we've done some upgrades on that code. We now believe that it doesn't have a major influence on the performance any more.

Best wishes,

The Devteam