v7 Guide : How To Setup Fares ?

[DisposableHero]

Hi, this question is the most asked one and with the SimBrief improvements we have in v7 this matter become critical ... Here you can find the basics about the logic and how to setup your fares/subfleets/flights properly.

 

1. Main Fares

 

You can define your fares in admin/fares. These will be your main fare types, which will then be used in your subfleets or flights. The main idea here is to define only the basics, so you can change them later when needed. Think fares like the seats in your plane (or cargo space), which can be sold as tickets. They are not in flight services or extended service types like WiFi, Hot Meals, Extra Snacks, Economy Premium or Economy Basic, they are just Economy seats you have. So lets start;

 

• Economy (Y)
• Business (J)
• First Class (F)
• Cargo (CGO)

 

These are the main fare groups commonly found in airliners, so start with Economy. When you are at admin/fares click Add New, and enter the info as described below

 

• Code : Y
• Name : Economy
• Type : Passenger ( for Cargo Fares type must be Cargo as expected )
• Price : 100
• Cost : 25
• Capacity : EMPTY / NULL ( Leave it empty, do NOT try writing EMPTY to that field )
• Notes : Fill as you wish
• Active : Checked

 

and click save ... In simple terms we will gain 75 Usd/Eur/Pound (currency comes from your settings) from each passenger 'cause there is an operating cost of a seat. Repeat the steps for rest if you wish. Why we left Capacity empty ? I will explain it later but for now we are just defining our base fares, so no need to have capacities here.

 

2. SubFleet Fares

 

Assuming you already have at least one subfleet, which is mandatory in v7. We can explain their logic later if necessary. Head up to admin/fleets and click edit one of your subfleets, or just create one and save (so you will be able to see the details). Scroll down a little bit and you will see Fares section there and it is probably empty. This is the area where we "assign" and "adjust" our main fares which will be used for this subfleet.

 

Click on Select Fare, you will see your defined main fares there. Select Economy and click Add. Now the fare is assigned to this subfleet and you will see it above values like below;

 

• Name : Economy
• Code : Y
• Type : Passenger
• Capacity : inherited ()
• Price : inherited (100)
• Cost : inherited (25)

 

This is where v7 magic begins  ... I will use an Airbus A320 with only economy class seats as my basic aircraft type. Click on the inherited text under capacity column and enter 180 there. Right now, when you use any member of this subfleet, you will have 180 seats ready for being sold with a price tag of 100 currency and it will cost you 25 currency to operate that seat.

 

If you want to change the price of your tickets or adjust the operating costs of your seats for this subfleet you can follow the same steps for price and cost. If you do so, your ticket prices and/or costs will be changed ONLY for this subfleet. While adjusting prices you can just use pure values like 150 or percentages like 125%. It is up to you how you change the value. Just do not use percentages on capacities, it really does not make any sense

 

Ok, passenger capacity and price/cost was easy ... How about having some cargo space/fare for a passenger plane. They are not designed to carry bigger loads like freighters but they do have some space under their belly, which is mainly used for carrying out passenger baggages, why not use the remaining space to earn some more money ?

Normally passenger planes are mostly limited by the cargo hold's (the name of the cargo area) volume but since we do not have any volume checking capability in simulator and phpvms, we will stick only on the weights here. Just add your pre-defined cargo fare to your subfleet like you added the passenger fares.

So, the logic is simple; Your Cargo fare should be big enough to hold all your passenger baggages. Then calculation is simple too 

 

180 (our pax capacity) * 35 lbs (our non-charter baggage weight : check admin/setting simbrief for default values) = 6300 lbs should be your minimum Cargo Fare capacity. If you want to carry some paid cargo, then you need to increase this amount up to a point where it does not passes your aircrafts Maximum Zero Fuel Weight when you have full pax on board. I know this may sound a little bit strange but this is how real thing works too  If you know your aircraft specification, then you can calculate your possible max cargo capacity by below formula;

 

Maximum Cargo Fare Capacity = MZFW - DOW - ( max pax seat capacity * pax weight )

 

DOW is Dry Operating Weight (Operating Empty Weight), it is the weight of your aircraft without fuel, passengers and cargo but with crew, catering and airline stuff loaded already. Anyway, if you do not know your DOW and MZFW then just add some space more to the above calculated value, make it like 8000 lbs. So you will have 1700 lbs free space to carry some cargo after taking all the passenger baggages for a fully loaded flight.

 

Please note; If your PhpVms weight settings are KG, just convert the amount you found to kilograms before adjusting the cargo fare capacity.

 

Just another note for SimBrief Form; The cargo fares of passenger planes will show you the Maximum Available capacity, though we named it max in short terms but this may lead confusions. So when you have passengers and their baggage, your cargo fare capacity will be reduced by the weight of the total passenger baggage weight. Therefore it is not the capacity you defined anymore, it is just what is left behind for you to load additional cargo. If you see negative values there, this is a clear indication that your cargo fare capacity is not enough to hold the passenger baggages  . And please keep in mind that SimBrief form uses your aircraft, meaning it reads your subfleet fares. It is a flight plan, do not expect it to read the fares of a flight, it is directly related to the aircrafy you want to generate a flight plan.

 

3. Flight Fares

 

Technically you really do not need to add fares to flights, but the logic is same as adding fares to subfleets. If you want to change the ticket price/cost of a fare for a specific flight you can do it here. Imagine having a special flight with doubled ticket prices, then just add the fare you want to adjust, click on the price or cost columns inherited text and enter 200%. Now you will have doubled price/cost for this flight only

 

I higly suggest you to not to define capacities at main fares and not adjust capacities at flight fares. This really makes life easier, in real world operations we do not define the capacity in fares and for flights (unless there is a special need). Capacity always comes from the aircraft (here in phpvms it comes from the subfleet) and when we (as OCC or Dispatchers) do change the aircraft of a flight or decide to do it with another aircraft other than planned by commercial planning or schedule planning departments of the airline, ticket sale systems just get the new aircraft info and use its capacity to stop the ticket sales automatically if it reaches the max seats.

 

Things do NOT work like the real world here, so if you have a 180 seat aircraft but define a main fare with 219 seat capacity or edit a flight's fare and set capacity to 239 there, results will not be nice

And always remember, fare logic follows below order;

 

• Flight (has highest priority, when you change thigns here, they will be used)
• Subfleet / Aircraft (medium priority over fare)
• Fare (lowest priority and gets overwritten by the ones above)

 

I  think this is enough for basic setup and understanding the logic how fares work in PhpVms v7.

 

Safe flights for now, will post some more info about different topics later.

 

Edited April 8, 2021 by DisposableHero
Edited the formula / Added a warning for EMPTY

[jonbeckett]

I find it interesting that the flight distance or time doesn't factor into the fare calculation for a flight (unless I'm missing something obvious)

[DisposableHero]

Nope you are not missing anything  

 

Fares based on distance or time (also expenses based on them) was something spoken about, but they never went into proper feature requests, thus never worked on.

 

At the meantime, lots of us developed automated fare stuff for our selves, thus not thought about it in general anymore. I had something built in my module, technically based on distance, tried to implement it in v7 but latest changes done to fare logic was making it tricky to implement, so I stopped working on it.

[DisposableHero]

You can find some discussion about it at forum and at GitHub repository, maybe from last year or before