EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

The impact of COVID-19 on airline passenger travel behavior: An exploratory analysis on the Chinese aviation market

Linfeng Zhang, Hangjun Yang, Kun Wang, Lei Bian and Xian Zhang

Journal of Air Transport Management, 2021, vol. 95, issue C

Abstract: China was the first airline market in the world to be hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been gradually recovering as the pandemic is largely contained domestically. However, with the global pandemic spread and great uncertainty, there has been a remarkable change in airline passengers’ travel behavior. This paper collected air passenger-level data from TravelSky in the Chinese market. In addition to the analyses on aggregate passenger flow patterns, this paper explores changes in airline passenger travel behavior, such as ticket booking time, age distribution of passengers, refunds and ticket changes, and passenger arrival time at airports. This is one of the first studies to focus on micro-level changes in airline passenger travel behavior by using objective passenger-level data. The pandemic-induced psychological changes in air travelers are explored, providing useful managerial and policymaking implications for the normalization of the pandemic and the recovery of the airline market in the post-pandemic era.

Keywords: COVID-19; Travel behavior; Airline passenger; Chinese aviation market (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0969699721000673
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jaitra:v:95:y:2021:i:c:s0969699721000673

DOI: 10.1016/j.jairtraman.2021.102084

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Air Transport Management is currently edited by Anne Graham

More articles in Journal of Air Transport Management from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:jaitra:v:95:y:2021:i:c:s0969699721000673