The Individual Travel Requests feature has been available for preview in our Paine game world since September. After months of tweaks and iterations, I feel confident that the feature is ready for a first roll-out to a regular game world. And Smith is that game world! Please find all the details below and don't miss the 10% discount we have going until the end of the weekend!
What's in the name?
The naming theme for our short-term game worlds revolves around aviation pioneers. So far, these were mostly pioneers in fields of engineering and aeronautics. But given that this game world is predominantly about a feature in the realm of business and economics, I decided to expand the theme into this direction: I picked "Smith" in reference to C. R. Smith, a former CEO of American Airlines who triggered the development of Sabre and thereby the first online reservation system. Given that ITRs are the first piece in the puzzle of bringing more depth to distribution in AirlineSim by modelling many of the real-world systems, including GDSs like Sabre, I found this a fitting name.
What does the exact configuration look like?
Given that Individual Travel Requests are a very new feature, I opted for a generic configuration that doesn't have too many moving parts. As such, Smith launches with regular slots and without second-hand aircraft. Compared to regular game worlds, initial demand is slightly higher to compensate for the increased market fragmentation introduced by ITRs.
Smith will run until February 10th, 2027.
Are Individual Travel Requests actually completed?
Pretty much, yes.
First of all, the version of ITRs running in Paine and Smith is the "bulk variant" (rather than the "point-to-point variant" developed for the AirlineSim Technology Demonstrator): It uses the general method of generating connections and distributing traffic the ORS uses in regular game worlds. So it distributes traffic for each airport once a day. The difference is that demand to each destination is split among many pseudo-random travel requests, rather than distributed to all available connections based on a single set of rules.
In terms of completion, the feature generally works as intended. Everything that's currently missing will be addressed by follow-up features (like pax for higher service classes never booking legs in lower classes to get a connection). And the general booking behavior is subject to ongoing tuning of the customer types' parameters.
For a complete and up-to-date overview of the state of Individual Travel Requests, check out and follow the feature preview thread on the forums.
Is Smith a preview game world?
In a sense it is. This is the first time ITRs are rolled out to a new game world, a situation that's only been around once before when Paine launched. And back then, the feature was still completely unbalanced. As such, I expect to gain new insights from this launch, which will of course feed back into tuning of the feature.
That said, Smith is a regular game world in the sense that it will only receive updates as part of regular maintenance patches. So no multiple reboots per day and no experimental features besides ITRs. The latter will be subject to adjustments, though. So please be aware that some changes to booking behavior are to be expected.
What's next?
As outlined in my Q1 development update, the next big topic is the UI refresh and the first feature planned to make full use of the new UI is a new search interface for the DS/ORS. But besides that, I am very keen on getting started on the first true extensions of the Distribution System, including Fares which will give a lot more control over pricing in the context of Individual Travel Requests.