Short or long routes

Would it be more profitable to do frequent, short routes or long distance routes? Would many routes for each aircraft be better? I'm having trouble keeping my airline profitable.

Try watching some gameplay videos on YouTube

Hi ianjazz,  I notice that in your airline in Sandbox has a fleet of 11 aircraft in 5 aircraft families.  By having more aircraft families increases your base maintenance costs alot, so it is worth trying to stick to only a couple of different families to start with until your airline has become established.  

It goes many, many, complicated ways. You can send short routes with lots of demand, yet make the same amount with long distance and less demand. It's really choice of airports and aircraft when you can really "profit". Also, under guides and reference you can see advice for new players or like Man of Aviation, you can look on YouTube too. Welcome to AE!

Hi ianjazz,  I notice that in your airline in Sandbox has a fleet of 11 aircraft in 5 aircraft families.  By having more aircraft families increases your base maintenance costs alot, so it is worth trying to stick to only a couple of different families to start with until your airline has become established.  

That world is the only game I've been able to make a profit. My other worlds all have only one family but lose money.

Ok, what you could try to get you going is to reduce your all employee wages to $7, and reduce the reserves to 0%.  This will save alot of money and once you are established, you can raise the wages and reserve levels again.

Also, you have alot of unused capacity at LGW, so you could return the unused gates too.  You could also set up an IFS that brings in some money too.  

 

Have a look at this thread, there are some decent pointers to help you out:

 

http://www.airline-e...ifs#entry214228

Also, try to find routes with no airlines operating them. 

Short routes ftw. The longer it is, the more your plane becomes a heavy fuel tanker, routes over 7000 miles are barely profitable considering not only fuel but the fact that they must be operated by very expensive planes, but even reasonable 3000 mile routes are wasteful compared to short routes. Especially short routes with scam IFS earn so much more money, I had frequent flights on CRJ700s earning more than A330s on very good intercontinental routes with minimal competition, and ATR-72s earning more than A320s on mid-range routes, seriously, big short routes are the best thing in this game...

 

Just don't listen to people who say only wide-body planes make sense. Don't use large planes on shortest routes because it's lame since in real life those routes tend to be frequent, and more important for your game, because turn-time will waste your A330s, 777s or A380s usability and on very short routes you can get an A380 to fly only a third of flights that A320 would do and a 6x more expensive plane will earn almost the same money.  

 

The only thing that's bothersome with awesome short and frequent routes is that gates are sometimes limited...

Short routes ftw. The longer it is, the more your plane becomes a heavy fuel tanker, routes over 7000 miles are barely profitable considering not only fuel but the fact that they must be operated by very expensive planes, but even reasonable 3000 mile routes are wasteful compared to short routes. Especially short routes with scam IFS earn so much more money, I had frequent flights on CRJ700s earning more than A330s on very good intercontinental routes with minimal competition, and ATR-72s earning more than A320s on mid-range routes, seriously, big short routes are the best thing in this game...

 

Just don't listen to people who say only wide-body planes make sense. Don't use large planes on shortest routes because it's lame since in real life those routes tend to be frequent, and more important for your game, because turn-time will waste your A330s, 777s or A380s usability and on very short routes you can get an A380 to fly only a third of flights that A320 would do and a 6x more expensive plane will earn almost the same money.  

 

The only thing that's bothersome with awesome short and frequent routes is that gates are sometimes limited...

 

Good answer

I would just add that you can objectively get an idea of what works in terms of profitability if having scheduled any given route you go and check what´s your return on assets (in this game, the assigned planes you had to buy or lease) taking into account how much they cost.

 

Example: If you buy a plane that costs 100 and you are able to make 10 net operating profit with that plane (plane's operating profit, not route operating profit!), you would have a 10% return. If you buy a plane that costs 200 and can generate 15 net with it, you would still be getting only a 7'5% net return on that plane. So in this case a better business would be to buy and fly 2 planes that would be making you 20 net in total than one plane that would be making 15. And short route planes are cheaper than long haul .

 

PS: Also keep in mind hidden costs that "professional clickers" in this game tend to overlook - instead of managing 1 plane you would need to manage 2 of them. Time wise if planes are scheduled on the same route it's not a big deal, but if you need to assign those 2 different planes to different routes, then you would have 50% increase in "time cost" that you would need to dedicate to first, schedule those routes and, second, to operate and monitor them, so your 10% net margin doesn't fall and become, let's say, 6% because of constant price wars that would shave any excess of profitability in non-collapsed airports when you can't keep an eye on them