Modelling airport and airline choice behaviour with the use of stated preference survey data

The majority of studies of air travel choice behaviour make use of Revealed Preference (RP) data, generally in the form of survey data collected from departing passengers. While the use of RP data has certain methodological advantages over the use of Stated Preference (SP) data, major issues arise because of the often low quality of the data relating to the unchosen alternatives, in terms of explanatory variables as well as availability. As such, studies using RP survey data often fail to recover a meaningful fare coefficient, and are generally not able to offer a treatment of the effects of airline allegiance. In this paper, we make use of SP data for airport and airline choice collected in the US in 2001. The analysis retrieves significant effects relating to factors such as airfare, access time, flight time and airline and airport allegiance, illustrating the advantages of SP data in this context. Additionally, the analysis explores the use of non-linear transforms of the explanatory variables, as well as the treatment of continuous variations in choice behaviour across respondents.