Earning Exactness

Market Analysis shows every carrier's shelf but never a market's size. Exact demand numbers exist in two places only: studies you pay for and routes you fly yourself.

PlaneSim never hands you the size of a market. That is a design decision, not a gap. Real airlines research markets; they do not download them. The Market Analysis page is built around that principle: a competitive view of one route, every carrier's bookable options beside yours, all of it operating under what the game calls demand fog.

What is public

Published capacity is everyone's business. The availability list shows every bookable itinerary on the pair from every carrier: departure time, routing, stops, cabin class, fare, and status, with through-fares and codeshares tagged. Historic capacities chart weekly seats offered on the pair across all carriers. Offered, not sold. Sales history is nobody's business but the seller's.

The page also gives you the market's character: its route type, its seasonal shape (a line like "peaks Jul to Aug, quiet Feb"), and whether it leans business or leisure. Character, not size.

Then there is the choice breakdown, the most instructive free item on the page. Expand any option and the market explains its ranking: the pull and drag of fare, travel time, transfers, schedule timing, comfort, service and image, expressed in money terms as felt by the route's largest customer type, with the ground-transport and no-travel alternatives alongside.

What stays dark

Exact daily passenger pools. The split by customer type. How much demand walked away, and why. Every rival's bookings and sold seats: your own performance column shows your booked seats and your share of the market's choices, while rivals' columns show a dash. You know who you carried, not who they did.

Sell-out spill, meaning how many passengers found every itinerary full, is deliberately shown to no one. No real airline observes the traffic that never booked, so you infer it from your own booking curve instead.

One thing is not part of this fog, despite what older guides said: aircraft records. A listed tail's condition, its hours since the last heavy check and its appraisal are open to every buyer, free, from the moment it is listed. The fog covers demand, and only demand.

Buying a number

The market study button sits on Market Analysis and on Route Evaluation. For a flat fee, $250,000 by default and valid for 60 game days, though your world may differ, it buys a banded weekly passenger figure for one direction of one pair: "8,000 to 12,000 weekly passengers", never an exact count. The band is stamped at purchase, so a later boom or slump never retro-edits the report you paid for. It is expensive, and it is the only demand figure money can buy.

Flying for one

Your own flown loads are the only exact demand numbers you will ever hold, which turns a cheap, small-gauge probe schedule into genuine market research. Around that anchor, the free signals line up.

• Selling out days before departure means unmet demand: raise fares or add seats. Loads that only fill on the day of departure are already spill from elsewhere.
• Many carriers, high frequencies and healthy fares mean somebody is eating well. An empty shelf on a big-city pair is either an opportunity or a warning, and the character line helps you decide which.
• If the breakdown says your option loses on schedule timing or transfers, no fare cut fixes it. If it loses on fare, you know your lever.
• The seasonal shape tells you when the peak comes. Judge a route on its year, not its best month.

Acting on it

The pair settings block sits at the bottom of the page: per-class fares with one-click matching of a competitor's price, the service level, and return-pair scoping, applied atomically, so the response to what you learned never requires a page change. The full reference is Market analysis under fog on the wiki; the fog itself is waiting at play.theplanesim.com.