Airline Club

General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: Andrew on April 10, 2019, 10:45:03 pm

Title: Setting ticket price to $0
Post by: Andrew on April 10, 2019, 10:45:03 pm
I'm seeing a competitor set his ticket price on many routes to $0. Should it be allowed? Also, I've heard that setting it to $0 is the same as $1 because the simulator can't cope with a 0. Is that true?
Title: Re: Setting ticket price to $0
Post by: patson on April 11, 2019, 02:04:35 pm
Free ticket is allowed. If someone wants to get passengers so badly, it's a legit option. However no negative price is allowed (ie giving out money to passenger)

The simulation is a bit complicated, it's hard to explain in simple terms but for each virtual passenger there's a "true cost" (consider all the connections, ticket price, lounge etc), that "true cost" can never be negative, otherwise passenger will indeed just travel back and forth on the same route until all seats are taken.

It's actually reasonable - consider an airline give $1000 away for each flight a passenger take, some people will just take that as a job and fly back and forth to get the money lol

So the simulation is indeed doing the right thing and handling it correctly - even back in the days that negative pricing was allowed. However i wanted to BAN this behavior so i artificially prevent negative "true cost" to avoid that and also set restriction of ticket price to be non-negative

HTH :)





Title: Re: Setting ticket price to $0
Post by: Andrew on April 12, 2019, 09:53:17 am
Free ticket is allowed. If someone wants to get passengers so badly, it's a legit option. However no negative price is allowed (ie giving out money to passenger)

The simulation is a bit complicated, it's hard to explain in simple terms but for each virtual passenger there's a "true cost" (consider all the connections, ticket price, lounge etc), that "true cost" can never be negative, otherwise passenger will indeed just travel back and forth on the same route until all seats are taken.

It's actually reasonable - consider an airline give $1000 away for each flight a passenger take, some people will just take that as a job and fly back and forth to get the money lol

So the simulation is indeed doing the right thing and handling it correctly - even back in the days that negative pricing was allowed. However i wanted to BAN this behavior so i artificially prevent negative "true cost" to avoid that and also set restriction of ticket price to be non-negative

HTH :)
I gotta admit I didn't understand all of it.

So for the "true cost", if the ticket price is 0 but other factors combined make the true cost negative, what would happen.

Also, I asked this question because I see one of my competitors setting his price to 0 on a bunch of routes, and thus getting full load. But when I also set my price to 0, I barely get any passengers, even though I have a higher route reputation and our connections are mostly similar. So I'm confused why that's happening.