Research On The Flight Choice Behavior Of Air Passenger Under Uncertainty

With the increased economic growth, the air traffic has been developing rapidly, the contradiction between the growth of the flights and flight punctuality is increasing. Flight delay not only bring a great deal of economic losses, can also lead to uncertainty of passengers' travel time. Currently, the average monthly flight punctuality is published on each airline ticket agent website in the process of flight to sell. There are a lot of researches on the flight delay, but the practical value of flight punctuality to which passengers use to make decisions about which flight to take is relatively unknown. This study introduced on-time performance factor into the flight choice mode, attempting to discuss the extent to which flight punctuality plays a role in travelers' flight choices.In order to comprehend the mechanism and examine the extent to which punctuality information plays a role in passengers' flight choices. The uniform design was used to generated the alternatives sets which included five flights, passengers were classified by travel purpose, the social demographic and travel experience and flight choice intention data of those two type passengers were collected through the Stated Preference(SP) questionnaire survey. The Multinomial Logit(MNL) is used in modeling flight choice behavior, and model for different trip purpose and different characteristic of traveler' were developed based on detailed data. According to the calibration results of the model parameters, the elastic value, and the willing to pay(WTP) values of the on-time performance were calculated, what's more, the What-if scenarios of the key factors were analysis. The results show that in the context of a business population, flight punctuality emerge as the most key factors influencing flight choices, while for the leisure passengers, price emerge as the most key factors. Interestingly, the study found that passengers with flight delay experience is more sensitive to the flight punctuality. Passengers for the business trip purpose is willing to pay the additional amount for the higher flight punctuality, passengers with flight delay experience is willing to pay more.Compared with the existing research on the domestic air passengers' flight choice behavior, this dissertation considers the flight punctuality factor and obtaining the willing-to-pay for flight punctuality, in order to provide reference for airline operation strategy such as airline pricing and revenue management. The study is also helpful to know more about the characteristics of passengers' choice and need, adopt diverse strategy to raise market share.