Market Analysis is the competitive view of one route: every carrier's bookable options side by side with yours, and the levers to respond. But it operates under demand fog: the game never hands you the size of a market for free. That is a design decision, not a gap: real airlines research markets, they do not download them. You can commission a study, fly the route and measure, or infer it from the shelf; what you cannot do is read it off a screen.
What you can see#
- Market character: the route's type (domestic, international, and so on), its seasonal shape ("peaks Jul–Aug, quiet Feb"), and whether it leans business or leisure. Character, not size; for size, buy the study below.
- Current availability: every bookable itinerary on the pair from every carrier: departure time, routing, stops, cabin class, fare, and status. Capacity is public; published schedules always are. Through-fares and codeshares are tagged.
- Your own performance: booked seats and your share of the market's choices, on your options only. Rivals' columns show a dash: you know who you carried, not who they did.
- The choice breakdown: expand any option to see why the market ranks it as it does: 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, alongside the ground-transport and no-travel alternatives.
- Historic capacities: weekly seats offered on the pair, across all carriers. Offered, not sold. Sales history is nobody's business but the seller's.
- The market study (once you buy one): a banded weekly passenger figure for the pair, described below.
What stays hidden#
Exact daily passenger pools, the split by customer type, how much demand walked away and why, and every rival's bookings and sold seats. Sell-out spill (how many passengers found every itinerary full) is deliberately not shown to anyone: 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. See Leasing, buying & ordering. What you buy, infer or earn is knowledge about demand.
Sizing a market anyway#
- Commission a study. The button sits on this page and on Route Evaluation. It buys a banded weekly passenger figure for one direction of one pair ("8,000–12,000 weekly pax", never an exact count) for a flat fee (by default $250,000, valid 60 game days; your world may differ). The band is stamped at purchase, so a later boom or slump never retro-edits the report you paid for.
- Fly it. Your own flown loads are the only exact demand numbers you will ever hold. A cheap, small-gauge probe schedule is genuine market research.
- Read the booking curve. Selling out days before departure means unmet demand: raise fares or add seats. Loads that only fill on the day are already spilled from elsewhere.
- Read the shelf. 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.
- Use the breakdown. If your option loses on schedule timing or transfers, no fare cut fixes it. If it loses on fare, you know your lever.
- Respect the season. The character line 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), service level, and return-pair scoping, applied atomically. For network-wide moves and standing policies, see Pricing & fares; for your own booking detail on the pair, see Inventory & load monitoring.