Customer Valuation of Flight Characteristics: a Stated Preference Approach

Knowledge of customer valuation of flight characteristics is important for carriers to decide on service and price levels. It may also be important for regulators to have some knowledge of customer valuation of flight characteristics, as this customer valuation determines to what extent individual flights are substitutes. Furthermore, valuation of characteristics may play a role in infrastructure investment appraisal. Nonetheless, quantifications of customer valuations in civil aviation are fairly scarce. We conducted a stated preference survey to quantify customer preferences, using conjoint choice experiments. Flight characteristics considered are in-flight time, direct versus connecting flights, landside access time, transfer time and fare. The valuation of flight characteristics depends on traveler characteristics. For instance, a high-income traveler is likely to value travel time higher than someone traveling on a leisure trip. We investigate the effect of age, gender, income, experience, ffp-membership and composition of household on the valuation of flight characteristics. As conjoint choice experiments reflect discrete choices, we estimate a multinomial logit model to assess valuations of trip characteristics. We present money values of the flight characteristics and compare them to the results of other studies.