How a Booking Actually Happens

Between publishing a schedule and watching passengers board sits a daily pipeline: demand pools, itinerary assembly, a ranked shelf of options, and a choice model in which not flying at all is always on the table.

Nobody in PlaneSim sells a ticket by hand. You publish a schedule and a fare; once a flight sits inside the booking window, the world's passengers find it, weigh it against every alternative, and either book or walk away. Most commercial mistakes in this game are misreadings of that pipeline, so it pays to know the stages.

The daily heartbeat

Every airport recalculates its demand once per game day. At that moment the market pools from that origin are refreshed, sized by city weight, distance, route type, season, day of week and a little noise. Then a booking pass runs over every departure inside the booking window, by default the next 3 days, though your world may differ.

Each flight gets one pass per remaining day, so bookings build gradually toward departure. An empty cabin three days out is normal. Judge the curve, not the snapshot.

Seats sold are persistent inventory. A seat booked today is gone for every later pass, and a direct passenger competes for the same physical seats as a connecting passenger crossing that leg. Your nonstop traffic and your hub feed are drawing down one pool of chairs.

Assembling the shelf

For each origin and destination market, the engine builds the bookable itineraries. Direct flights inside the window come first. Connections over an intermediate stop follow, normally same-airline, though interline agreements, alliances and codeshares open partner connections too. Two-stop routings are rare, appearing only where a market has almost no other options.

A connection only exists if the transfer fits: at least the minimum connect time at the transfer airport, 45 minutes by default and longer at big hubs in some worlds, and at most the maximum, 6 hours by default. A cabin class is only offered if it exists on every leg. The journey price is the sum of the segments unless a through-fare replaces it. Only a limited set of the best options per market makes the shelf, ranked by total travel time, so a slow routing may never be seen at all.

The choice

The buyers are a cast of customer types, nine by default, from budget travellers to executives, split between business and leisure. Each type has its own price sensitivity, value of time, aversion to transfers, preferred departure or arrival hours, cabin preferences, and a hard budget above which options simply vanish for it.

Every option on the shelf is weighed on fare, total travel time, transfers, timing against preferred hours, cabin comfort, on-board service against class expectations, your airline's image, and marketing. Two outside options always compete: ground transport, and simply not travelling. The exact formulas are deliberately unpublished, but Market Analysis exposes a per-option breakdown of these forces, so you can see why the market ranked your flight where it did.

Bookings also arrive in small groups rather than single seats, which is why thin routes fill in lumps.

Full flights and spill

When a flight sells out, unmet demand spills to the next-best alternatives. That may be your later departure. It may be a competitor. It may be the ground. Demand that no option could seat is lost for that day, never banked, so a consistently early sell-out is not a triumph; it is money handed to someone else. The standing responses are raising fares or adding capacity.

When the money lands

Multi-leg fares are split across legs roughly by distance, so a connecting passenger's revenue lands partly on each flight that carried them. Booked revenue is recognized only when the flight actually arrives. Cancel a booked flight and you recognize nothing, and instead pay passenger compensation at a premium over what they paid, which makes a sold-out cancellation one of the most expensive events in the game.

The full mechanics are documented at How booking works; the loads that result are yours to read at play.theplanesim.com.