Pricing for Nine Kinds of Passenger
Every cabin on every leg resolves to a fare, touched or not. On the other side of that fare sit nine customer types with nine budgets, and no single number clears them all.
You never publish one ticket price in PlaneSim. Every flight number carries a fare per cabin class, and the journey price a passenger sees is assembled from those per-leg fares. You can run a whole season without setting a single one by hand. Every one you do set is a lever.
Where the number comes from
For each class on each leg, the engine resolves the fare in strict order. First comes the explicit fare you set for that class. Failing that, your economy (Y) fare times the world's class multiplier: by default 1.6x for premium economy, 2.8x for business and 4.5x for first, though your world may differ. Failing that too, the engine's auto fare applies, a distance-based reference price for the leg, times the same multiplier.
Leave everything blank and the flight sells at the auto price, which tracks the route's distance sensibly. The auto fare is also your anchor. Pair pricing sliders work in percent of it, and it appears wherever you price a route, so a position like "ten percent over reference" is one you can state once and hold across a network.
The other side of the counter
Demand is not a curve, and the game never shows you one. It is a cast of customer types, nine by default, running from budget travellers to executives and split between business and leisure. Each type carries its own price sensitivity, value of time, aversion to transfers, preferred departure and arrival hours, and cabin preferences. Each also carries a hard budget.
That budget is the mechanic that should reshape your instincts. Price above a type's ceiling and those passengers do not trade down to a cheaper cabin or grumble and pay anyway. Your option vanishes for them entirely, and no screen records the demand that never looked at you. A fare pitched at what an executive tolerates is invisible to the budget traveller. A fare that fills the cabin with budget traffic leaves the executive's money unclaimed. One number cannot do both jobs, which is what the class structure is for: four prices aimed at different segments of the same pool, on the same metal.
Four tools, four scopes
| Tool | Scope | Behaviour |
|---|---|---|
| Airport pair settings | One route, optionally its return | Set or reset per-class fares and the on-board service level, applied atomically to every flight number on the pair |
| Ticket price adjustment | Whole network, or everything from or to one airport | One-shot percentage change to current fares, per class |
| Standard pricing policy | Network-wide and per country pair | A persistent percentage of standard price applied to every journey's total at booking time, still applying as schedules change |
| Fare products | One origin and destination pair | Through-fares that replace the segment sum on connections you market |
The pair settings block sits on both Market Analysis and Inventory, so repricing happens next to the evidence, and it includes a one-click match of a competitor's fare. For the standing policy, the most specific rule wins: an explicit route fare stays your base price, a country-pair rule beats the network rule, and rules never stack.
Price the journey, not the leg
By default a connection costs the sum of its segments. A fare product on an origin and destination pair replaces that sum for the classes you fill in, whenever your flight operates the first leg of the connection. Price below the segment sum to win connecting traffic over your hub. Price above it where passengers have no alternative. Options priced this way carry a "through" tag in Market Analysis.
Service rides on the fare
The same pair settings set on-board service, from None to Premium. Service costs you per passenger per hour, and passengers judge it against what their cabin class expects. Skimping in business class hurts more than skimping in economy, because the standard being missed is higher.
The feedback you actually get
None of this comes with a demand readout. The honest loop is loads and revenue, flight by flight, cabin by cabin, read against the fare positions you chose. The full reference lives at Pricing & fares on the wiki, and the worlds that will grade your answers are at play.theplanesim.com.