What your route really earns: connections, hubs and duty-free

Published

2026-09-13

Updated

2026-09-13

Reviewed by an editor

2026-09-13

A full aircraft and a good profit are different pieces of news. The route result, the company result, connecting revenue and a shop's result are all counted differently and land in different lines. Here is how to read them, so the network grows on money rather than on the number of lines on the map.

The route result and the company result are two numbers

A route's result for the day is flight revenue minus flight costs minus refunds for cancellations. There are seven cost lines: fuel, crew, landing, navigation, passenger handling, security and maintenance. A cancelled flight also costs compensation, $50 in 2024 prices for every passenger who would have fitted on it.

The company day is wider. It adds fleet insurance, an administrative share of revenue, parking for idle aircraft, hotel nights for stranded transfer passengers, and the money made and spent by lounges and duty-free. Fleet doctrine gets its own line: every base and every aircraft family beyond the first costs money daily, whether you fly or not. Lease and loan payments leave the account once a month as their own entries. So a route can be in profit while the company day is not, and the other way round.

If you have not opened a route yet, start with your first route and come back after the first closed day.

One calculation you can repeat

London Heathrow to Paris Charles de Gaulle, 29 June 2019: one three-year-old A320neo, two round trips a day, fare index 1.00, rating 50, awareness 1.00, seed 12345. Data sets aircraft 1.0.0, airports 2.0.0, series 1.0.0.

Load factor is 92%. A nearly full A320 on one of the densest pairs in Europe leaves a little over a thousand dollars a day. IATA's June 2025 outlook put the industry's expected net margin at 3.7%: an industry forecast is not a target return inside the game, but it explains neatly why load factor does not answer the money question. Break-even does, and the card prints it next to the load factor, in the same percentages.

Connections live on the seats left over

Direct demand is counted first; transfers appear only on the seats still free. A through ticket is split between the legs by distance, and its revenue sits beside the route's revenue rather than inside it: one passenger, two lines, counted once.

Waiting has a price. IATA defines minimum connection time as the time needed to move passengers and baggage between flights; in Jetopolis the window at your hub runs from 40 to 90 minutes depending on the size of the airport, and no passenger waits more than eight hours. Every hour beyond the comfortable window costs $45 in 2024 prices. From the year 2000 a long layover also books a hotel night for a share of premium transfer passengers, and that cost is split between the two legs that carried them.

The connection forecast is an upper estimate. It sees only your own network: codeshare partners are invisible to it, and rivals count only through their direct flights on the pair. At the end of the day the world settles everyone at once, and the seats left on a pair are shared. Read the fact, not the promise.

Waves: the schedule is the decision

An even schedule spreads departures across the day and sells direct seats well. A wave lands aircraft together and sends them out together, so a passenger can change planes and buy both legs at once. A base can run up to four waves a day, with a bank you set yourself, never shorter than the airport's connection time. The cost is stated plainly: a departure pushed out of the business peak sells worse to the direct market.

The hub screen shows your transit share, the top through markets and the connections you missed today, with the reason: no window in the schedule, no free seats, or a hub that is off the way. The first two are fixed with timing and frequency; the third is geography. Your own changes show at once, other players' changes arrive with the next tick.

A partner carries the passenger on

An alliance is joined with an eight-character invitation code, and a codeshare links the flights of two airlines. The airline that sells a through ticket keeps a 5% fee on the operator's share, and the daily report keeps that money in its own block: sold for partners, paid to partners. A partner network is worth having when it makes a journey workable with seats to spare, not when it adds another name to the alliance.

Duty-free is a second business in the same building

A lounge keeps premium passengers loyal and makes every route out of that hub a little easier to choose. Duty-free sells to passengers boarding their next flight here, across seven categories: perfume, alcohol, luxury, tobacco, sweets, souvenirs and electronics. You choose the floor area and the shelf mix; the airport takes a share of turnover, or a minimum guarantee when the day falls short. That guarantee rises 3% a year and is paid on a day that sells nothing.

Turnover is not revenue: the cost of the goods sits inside it. Only the zone result reaches the company day, after concession, staff and write-offs.

Not everyone can buy. For travel inside the European Community, duty-free sales ran until 30 June 1999, and in the game passengers on those routes walk past the shelves: counted in footfall, spending nothing.

Keep the scale of the real business as a reference, not a target. Dubai Duty Free reported sales of $2.378 billion for 2025, about $6.5 million a day, and that is a retailer's turnover, not an airport's profit. ACI describes retail and other non-aeronautical activities as the money that pays for airport development.

What deserves the next dollar

Start with the flight result. Then read connections, the lounge and retail separately. Never add shop turnover to airline profit, and never count a through ticket twice. Fix the schedule before buying seats the network cannot fill: moving a wave is cheaper than keeping an extra aircraft.

A hub that works shows one sign above all: the arrival fills the departure, and the time between them feeds a third business. Choose a world, go back to the guides or open your airline, and test one decision at a time.

This text was generated by AI and reviewed by a Jetopolis editor. The person or team responsible for publication is named in the byline. Sources and the review date are provided in the article. Game parameters are distinguished from historical facts.