Every seat you sell is sold to somebody, and not everybody wants the same thing. The Airline Tycoon splits the people on a route into five kinds of traveller who look at the same fare, the same cabin and the same airline and reach entirely different conclusions about whether to fly with you.
That split is why there is no single right price. A fare that fills an aircraft on one city pair leaves it half empty on another, and the difference is not the distance — it is who lives at either end.
Price hunters care about one thing. They compare your fare against what the route ought to cost and walk away from an increase that nobody else would notice. They have never heard of your airline and it does not bother them. If your strategy is volume at a low fare, these are your passengers, and they are loyal to exactly nothing.
Commuters fly the same route repeatedly and want it to be there when they need it. Price matters to them, but frequency matters more than it does to anyone else: a route flown once a day is a worse product for a commuter than the same route flown three times, at the same fare. They notice a shabby cabin slightly and forgive it quickly.
Comfort seekers are paying for the flight to be pleasant. Service and the age of the aircraft weigh on them more than the fare does, and they will pay above the reference price for a cabin that is worth it. Put an old aircraft with minimal service on a route full of them and they simply do not turn up, however cheap the ticket.
Brand loyal passengers choose an airline before they choose a flight. Reputation is the single biggest thing in their decision, and awareness — whether they have heard of you at all on that route — comes close behind. They are the hardest group to win and the most valuable to keep, because they are the only ones who will still be there after a competitor undercuts you.
Premium passengers barely look at the fare. What they want is a front cabin that exists, service that justifies it and an aircraft that is not tired. They are a small share of most routes and a large share of the revenue on the ones where they are present, and a premium cabin flown where they are not is the most expensive empty space in the game.
The five groups are not secret; the page you are reading describes them. What is secret is the mix — what share each group holds on a specific city pair. That is what a survey sells you.
The mix shifts with the route. Two capitals with heavy business traffic carry premium and brand-loyal passengers in numbers that a leisure route to a holiday island never does; the holiday island carries price hunters who would not have flown at all at a higher fare. A short hop between neighbouring cities is full of commuters. None of this is derivable from the map, the airport sizes or anything else visible in the game, and it is deliberately not published here.
The reason is simple: the survey is the best mechanic in the game and it is worthless the moment demand can be worked out on paper. So the wiki tells you that price hunters react harder to an increase than business travellers do. It will never tell you how much harder, or what share of Stockholm–Palma they represent.
An airline nobody has heard of is not the same as an airline with a bad reputation. The first is invisible; the second is known and disliked. The game tracks both, and awareness is per route, not per airline.
You build awareness on a route by flying it. Fly it regularly and people at both ends learn that the route exists and that you operate it; stop flying and the knowledge decays. A brand new route on a brand new airline starts from nearly nothing.
Awareness does not touch everybody. Price hunters and commuters do not care who they fly with — the cheapest seat at the right time is the whole decision. Comfort seekers care somewhat. Brand-loyal passengers care enormously: an unknown airline loses them almost entirely, because loyalty to an airline you have never heard of is a contradiction.
This asymmetry is the shortcut a low-cost airline gets. If you compete purely on fare, you can grow without ever building a brand, because your passengers were never going to choose you for your name. The price of the shortcut is that you are permanently locked out of the passengers who pay the most.
See also The economy, Routes and operations and Reading your numbers.
Start your airline