Should you activate and operate flights while you are growing your route and airline awareness?

Game Discussion
#1

I have my routes set, my fleet initial fleet landed, and my routes activated. Obviously, I have zero passengers on day one, but I’m realizing that I burning a lot of capital flying empty aircraft. I’m looking for advice on whether firms favor operating empty aircraft to build route awareness or to market the routes until a certain awareness is reached and then start flying. For a frame of reference, my airline is Gulf Coast Air.

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#2

Generally the best thing to do is to fly, than each day on the last leg of the route stop it, cancel the scheduled flights, adjust pricing to full loads and activate again and repeat until 100% route awareness.

Or you can take the lazy route which I do and that is just let it fly and bother about adjusting prices when it hits 100%, less work, but also less profit.

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#3

Even if you max out your route marketing, you will only gain 3% awareness a day. If you fly the route at least 2x daily round trip, you can gain that much easily, perhaps even more. Also don’t waste your money on airline awareness this early in the game. It’s just burning cash because it only becomes worth it once you hit 60-70% airline awareness. I only spend on route marketing once my airline is established and I fly long haul routes once daily, so don’t waste cash on that either.

Bottom line: fly your planes they will fill up on their own it just takes time

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#4

If our two masters above haven’t convinced you, let me try something you can relate to:

  • Route Awareness is just whether people know your airline is flying on this particular route
  • Airline Awareness is how popular your airline is in the world
  • If your airline doesn’t fly to a lot of countries and destinations in the world, why do you need to let the whole world know about your airline? So you don’t need to spend effort trying market yourself (ie. Don’t do airline marketing)
  • On the other hand, you would want people to fly on your route, so you would want to increase your Route Awareness.
  • If you just start marketing that you will fly on the route, but not start operations, then only a small group of people who are looking for a direct connection is interested in your flight. Once you start flying, however, people will review your airline’s services, quality; and therefore, they will spread the knowledge via word of mouth, and more people are now more aware that you are flying the route.
#5

This has all been very helpful! Thank you. I have been burning quite a bit of cash on Airline Awareness so I will stop that asap. Now I messed up my credit and need tp get that under control which seems like a headache.

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