Autopricing not giving me best profit

I'm flying DTW-PIT 5X with a Q400.

Autoprice gives me:
Ticket Price Automatically Set at: $560
Load Factor - %42.65
Projected Revenue - $88,365
Projected Profit - $74,677

Looking for the best profit manually:
Ticket Price: $460
Load Factor - %82.48
Projected Revenue - $140,381
Projected Profit - $126,692

And when I try to "Update route" I get an error message.

I just purchased two extra frames and did the plane swap, but I went back to auto pricing and it gave me an extra 10% revenue by adjusting after swapping.

A route was auto-updated to the following:
Ticket Price Automatically Set at: $1,667

Load Factor - %51.84
Projected Revenue - $164,199
Projected Profit - $154,060

My best profit approx:
Price: 1,600

Load Factor - %97.13
Projected Revenue - $295,286
Projected Profit - $285,146

Were these auto-updates made when opening the route, or after changing the route?

Were these auto-updates made when opening the route, or after changing the route?

Mine was when I swapped the route from a Beech to a Q400. I get the feeling that the autopricing does not work when you have "too much" capacity on the route. It leaves the price too high and the load factor too low. If you then lower the frequency, for example, it does a much better job.

EDIT: I used to be the only airline on DTW-ORD, but now there are several competitors. The autoprice function did not work properly in this situation, it left me with a less than 50% loadfactor and I was able to double my profit by setting the price manually.

It was after the route was changed. There may have been an aircraft change and some joining the route.

same for me. when i create a route with autopricing it will give me the 100% LF and as soon as the route screen loads after the route is created its down to 50-60% LF....
i try to reset the route and it gives the same result

I get too high projected profits. The profit calculator tells me, that after creating the route it should make 2,5 mil profit, but once created, the route only makes 400k. Is there a problem? The aircraft is an A380, one-way transpacific routes.

EDIT: I looked at this again, it seems that the autoprice wants to set a too optimistic price, which (after creating the route) results in a low loadfactor, that's what causes very low profits. If the price is manually adjusted in a way, that also after creating/modifying the route the LF stays around 100%, everything goes fine and profit is like expected.

a380: Oh, so YOU'RE the guy who's steamrollering me on IAH-DFW, are you?

Something that I've found is that after I change a route (add more frequencies/change the aircraft, etc.) when the autopricing calculates the price, it assumes that the competition's prices will remain static. However, as soon as I hit the update button, their prices all recompute and leave me with some miserable load factors. If I go in and recalculate again, I notice that my price drops, usually quite a bit. Most of the time, I will only have to go back into the route screen one time. But the more airlines you have on the right, the more likely it will be that you'll have to repeat this a couple of times.

OAAir,
You are correct that it only calculates your price once, and the others will immediately react. In the real world it would happen like this, but then everybody would keep reacting to each other's prices until it settled down somewhere. We can't do that here because it would cause an endless loop of companies changing their prices, so we have to stop somewhere.

The explanation makes sense, but I have this problem also on some routes without competition

Could the price calculation perhaps be scripted to run twice, or would that increase the server load too much?

Set up 4 aircraft in this Auto Pricing.

Managed to obtain $1.6 in revenue

Left it alone without touching it for 4 real days

Lost 1.2m in revenue

So, the idea of auto set price is cool, but still needs to be adjusted on the hour every hour.

Thats the down side.....

there's something strange on HND-LAX too.
I set the autopricing on and it give me 1,2m in revenue and load factor 98,75%. But when i saw the route on the route page,the lf drops to 30,45%. Then i set the price manually and i got 1,1m and the load factor is 100%, and when i go to the route page it happened again. Strange,isn't it ??

All I know is, my $3.9mil DOP last round has gone to $18.8mil this round.

Would it be possible to set the autopricing to prefer the lowest possible price/highest possible loadfactor? Especially on some long-haul routes it is problematic that the autopricing does try to solve low profits by rising prices, which only causes loss of profit.

To be honest, I don't think autopricing works when you switch aircraft. It was an omission on my part, and until I can get in to fix it, you'll have to go back in and update the ticket price after switching aircraft to get the best price.

As a quick fix, you can close the route on the first aircraft, and open it on the second aircraft.