Turn my space agency to tourist agency!

[ImmaStegosaurus!]

I'm not sure if this has been requested before but could it we see a feature for offering trips to space tourists like tourist agencies do? Currently a customer randomly walks in with their desired plan and bunch of money, you'll accept it or don't. You'll have no control over their will, you can't control when they come or how many of them come. This makes anything with more than 5 seats not worth it, as they'll fly empty most of the time.

What I'm proposing is to have feature implemented so we could, as service providers, offer a package deal with a price we could set by ourselves. Higher to make more profits or lower to get more demand. This would make larger passenger spacecraft and SSTO's desirable, as well as it could incentivize building and launching space liners, stations, hotels and other related infrastructure to support space tourism. This would make Mk.3 passenger module properly useful. This would move KSP from where we're now in reality with dawn of space tourism to age of actual space tourism where space travel and tourism are common things.

Slightly related cool pic of Rockwell's concept to make this post little more interesting.

[Magzimum]

I'd like to offer a simpler solution to get us to design large space planes and SSTOs:

We just need a new type of mission, in which we get a much larger group of tourists that all want to go to a single destination. The idea behind it is that one of the agencies now acts like a tourist agency, and did all the work to get that group of tourists for us. My version lacks certain economic strategic features that your idea did have (i.e. setting the price to get a certain amount of tourists), but it is far more likely to be implemented because it's much less coding for the developers.

I probably share your frustration with tourist missions in which 5 tourists all want to fly to completely different destinations. As soon as the number of possible destinations has grown beyond Duna, I stop taking on tourists altogether because I just cannot be bothered with the complex logistics of having all these tourists on multiple missions across the system until I have finally fulfilled their complex wish-list.

[pandaman]

I quite like the OPs idea.

How I see it working is that you, as a manager of the program, define the 'product' along similar lines to what Blue origin and Virgin Galactic have done - design your vessel around what you want to offer, eg. 'Orbital trips around Kerbin in a spaceplane' then advertise - 'We have 16 seats available for this flight on this date', customers could pay a deposit in advance, and the balance on the day.  If you fail to deliver you have to refund and take a Rep hit.

[TheGuyNamedAlan]

this shouldbe a new game mode. it sounds more reasonable.

ps. i somehow got on the web via my kindle and i am writing this on it. pretty cool

[Wjolcz]

We don't need a new type of mission. We need filters for contracts (like in the Strategia mod), or a contract designer where we would be able to design our own missions and pick the customers ourselves.

2 hours ago, Magzimum said:

 

I probably share your frustration with tourist missions in which 5 tourists all want to fly to completely different destinations. As soon as the number of possible destinations has grown beyond Duna, I stop taking on tourists altogether because I just cannot be bothered with the complex logistics of having all these tourists on multiple missions across the system until I have finally fulfilled their complex wish-list.

Same. The mission slot machine (AKA Mission Control) can get annoying. Makes me wish I could filter out the missions I'm not interested in.

[DrLicor]

You can filter your contracts with contract configurator, when playing career, I filter all those other contract so I only get the toerist contracts. Gives you quite a lot of money.

But that space shuttle design; during launch and especially during re-entry it gets exposed to g-forces where you need to be trained for.  (looking from a realistic point). Plus, do the toerist see something inside the cargobay? Not that is has anything to do with the subject, just curious 

[Wjolcz]

Oh, and by the way (sorry to multipost like crazy) it would also be nice to be a purely tourism-focused program. Unfortunetaly it's not possible because of how the research system works.

ALWAYS BLAME THE CAREER MODE!

[magnemoe]

10 minutes ago, Veeltch said:

We don't need a new type of mission. We need filters for contracts (like in the Strategia mod), or a contract designer where we would be able to design our own missions and pick the customers ourselves.

Same. The mission slot machine (AKA Mission Control) can get annoying. Makes me wish I could filter out the missions I'm not interested in.

Yes, not only is it an logistic issue, its also the contract time then kerbals want to visit different planets, say one want Duna and Jool, second want Dress and Jool while last want Duna and Dress. 
You here have to spend time going to Jool and back, then Duna and back and finaly Dress and back to fulfill the contract. 
An satellite contract is far quicker to fulfill freeing up for another contract. 
So standard should be inside one system, it ok that some want to land on Ike and other Duna, 
Larger groups would also be nice.