Awareness, campaigns and championships

An airline that nobody has heard of is not a cheap airline — it is an airline with a smaller pool of customers. Awareness is measured per airport, from 0 to 100, and it decides how many of the people flying out of that airport will even consider you when they compare fares.

Awareness is not a discount. It does not make your seats cheaper or your costs lower. It changes who is in the room when the choice is made.

Who cares that they have heard of you

Not everyone. The five kinds of traveller weigh a brand very differently:

This asymmetry is the whole reason a low-cost strategy works as a shortcut. If you sell purely on price you can skip brand building entirely, because the people you are selling to were never going to care. The price of the shortcut is that the passengers who pay the most are exactly the ones you are invisible to.

How it grows on its own

Flying builds it. Every departure that lands raises awareness at both ends of the route, and the gain shrinks as the level climbs — the first thirty points come quickly and the last ten barely come at all. There is a daily ceiling on how much traffic alone can add, so running the same route eight times in an afternoon does not buy you a brand.

Silence takes it away. An airport where you have not landed a single flight in the last week loses ground every Monday. Your own bases have a floor and never fall below it, because you are visibly there whether you fly today or not.

Campaigns: buying it instead

A campaign commits a weekly budget at one airport for a number of weeks. The money is not taken when you start it — it comes out of the Monday settlement, along with everything else the airline owes. If you cannot pay the whole marketing bill that week, none of it is paid and none of it buys anything, and the weeks still count down. Money you do not have buys nothing.

Three things are worth knowing before you commit:

• Growth is a share of the gap to 100. A campaign at an airport nobody associates with you moves fast. A campaign where you are already well known moves almost not at all. The last ten points are the most expensive points in the game.
• There is a ceiling on the useful budget. Above a certain weekly spend at a single airport the extra money does nothing at all. Without that ceiling a rich player would buy a perfect brand everywhere in one week, and the whole mechanic would be decoration.
• Everyone can see it. Starting a campaign is published in the news feed. Your rivals will know which airport you have decided matters, and that is not a leak — it is part of the game.

Championships: winning it

Every airport has a champion: the airline with the strongest presence there, counted as the number of routes touching the airport. Reputation breaks a tie. The title is recalculated every half hour as the world moves, and it is worth five points of awareness at that airport and one point of reputation, awarded once a week for as long as you hold it.

Two things follow from this that are easy to miss:

• A title can be taken from you. Someone who opens more routes into your airport becomes its champion and you stop being paid for it. This gives you a reason to defend a position rather than only to expand.
• Computer-run airlines compete for titles too. Presence is counted from routes and not from departures, precisely so that they can. A championship that only human players could win would be a championship against nobody.

Alliances add their members' titles together, and the alliance table on the market screen ranks them. It costs no new mechanic and gives an alliance something to be about beyond the demand bonus.

What this is not

There is no advertising minigame, no creative agency, no billboard placement and no brand health score. Awareness is one number per airport, it goes up when you fly or when you pay, it goes down when you go quiet, and it decides how many people were willing to look at you in the first place.

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