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We’ll focus on a very important part of the game: how to open a route. Indeed, you cannot send your aircraft around the world without this step. Therefore, we will follow all the steps of the route purchase.
The world map
- Choice of the hub
If you are a beginner airline, you will probably have only one hub (= airport). Otherwise, you may have several hubs all around the world and in this case, you will choose the hub from which you will open your route.
- Choice of the destination country
Choose the country from which you want to open a route by tapping its geographic zone.
To make the search of your future routes easier, choose the country on which is based your airline or a bordering country for short-haul flights. Otherwise, choose farther countries for medium-haul flights or long-haul flights. Remember, the longer the route is, the less aircraft can fly on it!
Filtering tools
Once you have chosen the country, you can use the available tools to filter routes according to your preferences:
- Reference aircraft: very useful tool, it enables you to know the flight duration of an aircraft model if you already have it. Otherwise, you can always calculate the flight duration yourself.
- Country: change the country.
- Category: sort routes by accepted aircraft category (from 1 to 10).
- Search: enter the name of the route you want to open.
- Sort routes:
– Accepted categories range from 1 to 10 as for aircraft and they are calculated according to the takeoff distance which is also an available information for aircraft. The longer the takeoff distance is, the higher the category is, so more aircraft can fly on the route.
It is useless to purchase routes with a high category if you only offer short-haul flights since it will be expensive in operating costs and at purchase. Choose according to your needs, same advice as for aircraft.
– Distance + and distance -, you sort the distance of the route either in ascending order (from – to +) or in descending order (from + to-).
– Alphabetical order.
What you should take into account: AUDIT
To make a good choice, you should take into account several indicators you can often find by tapping “More details” and after you have performed an audit:
- Audit: there are two types of audit.
– The external audit which enables you to learn more about the important characteristics of a route and estimate its profitability.
– The internal audit which enables you to set the ideal price for your routes.
- Traffic: the more there are stars, the higher the traffic.
- Demand: you can see if the demand is more or less important for each passenger class.
- Airport tax: indicates the amount to pay for each flight (can be reduced with the R&D).
Characteristics of a route
As accounting between aircraft and routes is important, we’ll look at the characteristics of a route. Please refer to the aircraft characteristics (“Aircraft purchase” page) so you can clearly understand.
Note: In our example, only the first is interesting because the category and the range of the aircraft match those of the route. In other cases, they are not compatible. The route category has to be higher or equal to the aircraft category and the route length has to be shorter than the aircraft range.
Tip for beginners: remember this picture to understand how categories work.
Purchase the route
There are several prices displayed because of the subsidies that are granted to decrease the cost of routes.
As you open more and more routes, the subsidies decrease and you will have to pay more until you reach the gross price. In this case, purchase a new hub.
You have made your choice according to your own criteria. Now all you have to do is confirming the purchase so that your route appears in your schedule. Finally you just have to schedule flights and best manage the route prices so that demand meets offer and you can optimize your revenues.
To open a route, the minimal required distance between your departure Hub and your destination is 100 km.