Business flying

[TimoDD]

Hi,
Since I almost fly only Business & GA-ops I miss the fact of trip prices per hour or per nm instead of ticket prices per person per nm.
It would also handy if we can set the prices per plane-type separately becaust there are many deviations between piston-props, turbo-props & jets.
I have knowledge of next real live prices:
- Cessna C172 Skyhawk              165€/hour     regardless of number of passengers per flight.
- Piper PA32 Saratoga II TC         900€/hour     regardless of number of passengers per flight.
- Daher-Socata TBM850           2.150€/hour     regardless of number of passengers per flight.
- Pilatus PC12                         2.400€/hour     regardless of number of passengers per flight.     

Business planes are never available with a price per seat. But only with a price for the plane per hour regardless the number of pax onboard.
I hope to use the economic way of FSCaptain in my sim & site/company -experience. But the actual way of ticket-prices blocks me every time again on an unrealistic way in that business.
When I fly with my PA32 or TBM850 two wealthy business pax what is a reality, I fly with loss. If I rise the ticket prices to fly with profit on that ops , and next time I fly the same planes with four pax, do I have an unrealistic high profit for that next ops. By this fact I hope on some extentions in the backstage of FSCaptain.

Kind Regars,
Timo

[Travis]

Oct 23, 2016 5:39:16 GMT -5 TimoDD said:

Business planes are never available with a price per seat. But only with a price for the plane per hour regardless the number of pax onboard.
]I hope to use the economic way of FSCaptain in my sim & site/company -experience. But the actual way of ticket-prices blocks me every time again on an unrealistic way in that business.
When I fly with my PA32 or TBM850 two wealthy business pax what is a reality, I fly with loss. If I rise the ticket prices to fly with profit on that ops , and next time I fly the same planes with four pax, do I have an unrealistic high profit for that next ops. By this fact I hope on some extentions in the backstage of FSCaptain.

Hi Timo,

We are certainly willing to change what we can to make FSCaptain work better for all!  As a matter of fact, your posting is well timed to help us with some choices we'd like to investigate for future versions of FSCaptain.

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First, please know that until we advance to version 1.8.0 or 2.0.0 all profit / loss calculations are made 'on the fly' each time you run the Administrator... so today if you raise your ticket prices, all flights will be more profitable, etc.

This mainly stems from the fact that we do not change our 'company log' format very often and there is no room in it now to store a flight's profit / loss.

However another reason we have not done so until now is that we are gathering feedback from Captains such as you and if we had already locked down things like this we would be unable to change previous flight calculations. So I am hopeful that in the long run, this will work to everyone's benefit.

So please know that we are planning a large change in the company log within the next year, and this will be an item that will be recorded for posterity - once we have what everyone feels is the "best way" to make such calculations.

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Questions:

• Could these prices you quote be considered the "operating / lease" prices (per hour) for these aircraft?  (Because we support this.)
• Are you (as an air charter service) looking to sell flights on a 'fixed price (per hour or per flight)" basis?  (This we do not currently support.)

Our current model is that the airline pays (per hour) a fixed cost for an airplane & fuel, for its crew, and for any cabin service provided.  The airline then generates revenue based on selling 'seats' for a flight.  This is more focused on 'competitive' commercial airliners than smaller airlines... although the same model could apply.

1.7.3 Beta will ship with a real-world economic business taxi airline which flies here in California.  (Only in PC12s.)  This airline charges their passengers a fixed amount per month for 'unlimited flying' which is quite different from the model we employ.  (Our data files for this airline use our default ticket pricing, so it's likely this FSCaptain airline would never show a profit without some 'creative pricing changes.'  )

I wanted to include this airline (of which we have no association) to generate discussion on other types of business models... which is where your thread here has landed me!

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One of the legacy items in FSCaptain is that you have to first select an aircraft and then have flights presented to you.  Some flights have lots of PAX and cargo, some don't.  Some flights may make 'economic sense' for the airline, others... don't.  (Imagine wanting to fly an A320 for 2 hours and have a flight presented with 70 PAX.  Off the top of my head - no profit there.  But if you were to switch airplanes to a CRJ7 or Q400... then you might have the chance to make some money.)

One of the aspects of our "FSCompany" add-on would be to select the aircraft to use after the "batch of cargo" or "group of passengers" has been generated.  So if you're told you have 70 PAX going from KSFO to KLAX, and your airline has a B757 and an MD-80 on call... the choice should be simple.

Regards,

[TimoDD]

Hi, my problem is that the prices by a business company is calculated on another way than by an airliner company.
Airliner company's calculate per ticket. Business company's calculate per flighthour.
I found some prices online:

Voldirect business company:
TBM850 & PC12 by Voldirect: www.voldirect.aero/en/adapted-pricing
PA32: www.piairservices.com/our-offers

I think I will focus me for the financial/economic way further on own created semi-automatic spreadsheets and use FSC for the flight/pilot-rating and the handy FCDU + the random assignment creator.
It's for me only more manual work to collect the financial data. I was hoping that this could be automated by my semi-automatic spreadsheet-system and the two XML-files available in the 'data'-map .

[Travis]

Timo,

Those sites seem to have a "we're charging nnnn per hour, no matter how many passengers fly." I believe this is something we can allow (in the future) for an airline instead of a "TICKET" price. Such would go far to account for the other airline pricing that I mentioned....

The Voldirect details page is interesting....

For a 1 hour PC12 flight with 8 passengers from Rennes to Bordeaux is 315€ per passenger. For another 8 passenger flight from Rennes to Limoges (all three airports in France) is 288€ per passenger. This is non-taxed pricing, so it should be very similar in regards to the airline's needs.

I wonder what the discrepancy is between the two flights??? On other flights Voldirect tracks time to the minute... but on these two "1h" flights there is a 27€ per passenger difference. (216€ in total for the aircraft....)

Regards,