AIRLINE ITINERARY CHOICE IN A DYNAMIC SUPPLY ENVIRONMENT: RESULTS FROM A STATED PREFERENCE SURVEY

Uzi Freund-Feinstei () and Shlomo Bekhor ()
Additional contact information
Uzi Freund-Feinstei: Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee, Postal: Department of Tourism and Hotel Management, Kinneret College on the Sea of Galilee, Israel, http://www.kinneret.ac.il/Web/En/Default.aspx
Shlomo Bekhor: Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Postal: Transportation and Geo-Information Engineering, Technion Israel Institute of Technology, Israel, http://www.technion.ac.il/en/

Journal of Tourism, Sustainability and Well-being, 2017, vol. 5, issue 4, 400-424

Abstract: This paper investigates the choice of airline itineraries in dynamic settings using a tailored stated preference survey. The paper hypothesizes that airline itinerary choice is not a one-time event, but a continuous process during a certain time frame. Consumers can choose either to purchase an itinerary, deferring choice up to the end of the sales period, or completely declining the purchase. Understanding such consumers’ behavior is specifically relevant to the tourism industry, where firms are extensively utilizing internet websites to offer their products (e.g., airline tickets, hotel rooms) to consumers. The paper describes the stated preference survey with real itineraries of various airlines on medium and long-haul routes. Choice sets are composed with dynamic and static variables and socio-economic variables. Questionnaires were distributed electronically among various groups of respondents, yielding a sample of 914 persons. Results show that (i) itinerary choice deferring takes place, with differences between tourists and business travelers, (ii) the decision whether to defer choice is affected by dynamically changing variables and by the length of each respondent’s allocated choice period, and (iii) the proposed methodology is adequate for investigating choice in dynamic settings and thus indicating its potential for further research in transportation planning and in tourism.

Keywords: Air Transportation; Discrete Choice Modeling; Dynamic Choice; Travelers Behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B49 C33 C35 L93 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cieo.pt/journal/J_4_2017/article5.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

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:ris:jspord:0952

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Tourism, Sustainability and Well-being is currently edited by Patrícia Pinto

More articles in Journal of Tourism, Sustainability and Well-being from Cinturs - Research Centre for Tourism, Sustainability and Well-being, University of Algarve University of Algarve, Faculty of Economics, Campus de Gambelas, 8005-139 Faro, Portugal, Coordinator of the Centre: Prof. Patrícia Pinto, E-mail: pvalle@ualg.pt. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Silvia Fernandes ().