Most management games tell you what you earned. The Airline Tycoon also tells you what your passengers thought, which is the number that predicts what you will earn next month. The statistics page is where an airline stops being a spreadsheet and starts being a business with customers.
Everything on it comes from the flights themselves. Every departure records who was on board, how satisfied each kind of traveller was and — when they were not satisfied — what the main reason was.
The first thing you see is how each of the five passenger groups rated flying with you. The groups are described in Who flies with you; what matters here is that they rate you on different things, so a spread of scores is normal and informative.
Price hunters scoring well while comfort seekers score badly is not a failure — it is a description of the airline you are running. It becomes a problem only if you are also trying to sell a premium cabin.
Watch the gap rather than the average. An airline where every group sits in the middle is one that has not committed to anything, and it will be beaten on price by a low-cost carrier and on product by a full-service one.
The same passengers, sorted by where they sat. This is the fastest way to spot a cabin that does not belong on a route: a first cabin with high satisfaction and almost no passengers is a cabin that is nice and empty, and empty premium seats are the most expensive space you can fly.
Low satisfaction in economy with high load is the opposite problem — you are filling the aircraft by underselling the experience, which works until somebody else does it better.
Complaints are ranked by how many passengers they came from, and each one is the worst thing about the flight for that passenger, not a list of everything they disliked. That is why the list is short and why it moves when you fix something: solve the biggest complaint and the second biggest becomes the headline.
The reasons are the things you can actually change — the fare against what the route expects, the level of service, your reputation, how often you fly the route, the age of the aircraft, and whether anybody had heard of you.
Praise works the same way in reverse. A group that scored well gets to say why, and the share tells you how much of your traffic agreed.
The useful habit is to read the complaints as a to-do list ordered by revenue rather than by severity. A complaint from a group that is two percent of your passengers is worth less attention than a milder one from the group that is half of them.
Three breakdowns: by group, by cabin and by destination. The group chart is the one worth studying, because it is the only place you see the realised mix — not what the survey said the market looked like, but who actually chose you.
The difference between those two is your competitive position. If a route surveys as heavily premium and your aircraft comes back full of price hunters, the premium passengers went somewhere else, and knowing that is worth more than the survey was.
The header says how many of your departures had a survey behind them. Flights on unsurveyed routes still fly and still earn, but they cannot report a passenger mix, because the mix is exactly what the survey buys.
If that number is low relative to your fleet, the statistics page is describing a small and possibly unrepresentative slice of your airline.
See also Who flies with you and The economy.
Start your airline