An assessment of air passenger confidence a year into the COVID-19 crisis: A segmentation analysis of passengers in Norway

The COVID-19 crisis has become the most intense and long-lasting in the history of aviation. There is already a significant literature on the immediate impact of the outbreak, as well as on speculation on the future evolution of the industry. This paper seeks to contribute to this discussion by assessing a year into the crisis the demand related aspects and passenger behavioural impacts of the pandemic. Specifically, the paper aims to identify discrete market segments of air passengers according to their shared attitudes and preferences about air travel in light of the COVID-19 crisis, as well as past behaviour and future travel intentions. To achieve this, we analyse data from a large (n = 2096) online questionnaire survey of air passengers in Norway. The cluster analysis identifies four distinct passenger segments, with each displaying varying attitudes, behaviours, and levels of concern about air travel. One of these groups, described as the ‘Apprehensive Elders’, were identified as having the highest level of concern about flying, and subsequently showed a sharp decline in their intention to travel in the future. Another group, termed the ‘Cautious Commuters’, showed similarly enhanced levels of concerns about flying, but maintained a high propensity to fly following the pandemic despite these concerns. Regarding possible interventions to increase confidence in flying in the future, across all segments the data shows a clear preference for more ‘traditional’ active interventions, including wearing of face masks and enforcement of physical distancing, over and above passive or technological interventions. Norway represents a valuable case as a possible signal for future policy and practice in relation to the recovery of air travel following the pandemic. The findings have important implications for air transport managers and decision makers in terms of managing the perceptions and expectations of different passenger groups as air travel begins to return.     

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

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.     

Estimating the impact of COVID-19 on air travel in the medium and long term using neural network and Monte Carlo simulation

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a substantial impact on the airline industry. Air travel in the United States declined in 2020 with significantly lower domestic and international flights. The dynamic change and uncertainty in the trend of COVID-19 have made it difficult to predict future air travel. This paper aims at developing and testing neural network models that predict domestic and international air travel in the medium and long term based on residents' daily trips by distance, economic condition, COVID-19 severity, and travel restrictions. Data in the United States from various sources were used to train and validate the neural network models, and Monte Carlo simulations were constructed to predict air travel under uncertainty of the pandemic and economic growth. The results show that weekly economic index (WEI) is the most important predictor for air travel. Additionally, daily trips by distance play a more important role in the prediction of domestic air travel than the international one, while travel restrictions seem to have an impact on both. Sensitivity analysis results for four different scenarios indicate that air travel in the future is more sensitive to the change in WEI than the changes in COVID-19 variables. Additionally, even in the best-case scenario, when the pandemic is over and the economy is back to normal, it still takes several years for air travel to return to normal, as before the pandemic. The findings have significant contributions to the literature in COVID-19's impact on air transportation and air travel prediction.     

Testing the differentiated impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on air travel demand considering social inclusion

The economic downturn and the air travel crisis triggered by the recent coronavirus pandemic pose a substantial threat to the new consumer class of many emerging economies. In Brazil, considerable improvements in social inclusion have fostered the emergence of hundreds of thousands of first-time fliers over the past decades. We apply a two-step regression methodology in which the first step consists of identifying air transport markets characterized by greater social inclusion, using indicators of the local economies’ income distribution, credit availability, and access to the Internet. In the second step, we inspect the drivers of the plunge in air travel demand since the pandemic began, differentiating markets by their predicted social inclusion intensity. After controlling for potential endogeneity stemming from the spread of COVID-19 through air travel, our results suggest that short and low-density routes are among the most impacted airline markets and that business-oriented routes are more impacted than leisure ones. Finally, we estimate that a market with 1% higher social inclusion is associated with a 0.153%–0.166% more pronounced decline in demand during the pandemic. Therefore, markets that have benefited from greater social inclusion in the country may be the most vulnerable to the current crisis.     

How did COVID-19 impact air transportation? A first peek through the lens of complex networks

The current outbreak of COVID-19 is an unprecedented event in air transportation. This is probably the first time that global aviation contributed to the planet-wide spread of a pandemic, with casualties in over two hundred countries. As of August 23rd, 2020, the number of infected cases has topped 23 million, reportedly relating to more than 800,000 deaths worldwide. However, there is also a second side of the pandemic: it has led to an unmatched singularity in the global air transportation system. In what could be considered a highly uncoordinated, almost chaotic manner, countries have closed their borders, and people are reluctant/unable to travel due to country-specific lock-down measures. Accordingly, aviation is one of the industries that has been suffering most due to the consequences of the pandemic outbreak, despite probably being one of its largest initial drivers. In this study, we investigate the impact of COVID-19 on global air transportation at different scales, ranging from worldwide airport networks where airports are nodes and links between airports exist when direct flights exist, to international country networks where countries are contracted as nodes, and to domestic airport networks for representative countries/regions. We focus on the spatial-temporal evolutionary dynamics of COVID-19 in air transportation networks. Our study provides a comprehensive empirical analysis on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on aviation from a complex system perspective using network science tools.     

The impacts of COVID-19 on the global airline industry: An event study approach

This study examines the short-term impact of the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak on 52 listed airline companies around the world by using event study methodology. The results demonstrate that airline stock returns decline more significantly than the market returns after three major COVID-19 announcements were made. Overall, investors react differently during the three selected events. The strongest overreaction is noted in the post-event period of the World Health Organization's and President Trump's official announcements. Moreover, the findings confirm that traders in Western countries are more responsive to recent information than the rest of the world. The findings call for immediate policy designs in order to alleviate the impact of the pandemic in the airline industry around the globe.     

Exploring the dynamic impacts of COVID-19 on intercity travel in China

Many studies have explored the effects of transportation and population movement on the spread of pandemics. However, little attention has been paid to the dynamic impact of pandemics on intercity travel and its recovery during a public health event period. Using intercity mobility and COVID-19 pandemic data, this study adopts the gradient boosting decision tree method to explore the dynamic effects of the COVID-19 on intercity travel in China. The influencing factors were classified into daily time-varying factors and time-invariant factors. The results show that China's intercity travel decreased on average by 51.35% from Jan 26 to Apr 7, 2020. Furtherly, the COVID-19 pandemic reduces intercity travel directly and indirectly by influencing industry development and transport connectivity. With the spread of COVID-19 and changes of control measures, the relationship between intercity travel and COVID-19, socio-economic development, transport is not linear. The relationship between intercity travel and secondary industry is illustrated by an inverted U-shaped curve from pre-pandemic to post-pandemic, whereas that with tertiary industry can be explained by a U-shaped curve. Meanwhile, this study highlights the dynamic effect of the COVID-19 on intercity mobility. These implications shed light on policies regarding the control measures during public health events that should include the dynamic impact of pandemics on intercity travel.     

Predicting the impact of Trans Java Toll Roads on demand for intercity air travel in Indonesia

This paper aims to explore the factors influencing a potential air passenger shift to autos due to the completion of the Trans Java Toll Road and an increase in airfares. The study focuses on intercity trips for nonbusiness purposes. A face-to-face interview survey of 751 air passengers was conducted in three main airports on Java Island, Indonesia. Both the theory of planned behavior and the discrete choice model were applied to understand the factors for influencing toll road use among air passengers. The empirical results reveal that psychological factors, consisting of attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived moral obligations significantly influenced intentions to use the toll road. Meanwhile, perceived control of external resources was essential for airline passengers in their intention to use toll roads. Sociodemographic factors such as age, gender, income, frequency of airplane use, travel time, and cost also significantly influenced the decision to drive. Female, older passengers, high-income passengers, and frequent flyers were more likely to continue flying. The finding confirms that the Trans Java Toll Road affected a decline in air demand on Java Island. However, traveling with family members, rather than airfare hikes, became a more substantial reason for air passengers to switch to driving the toll roads. This research found that air passengers were inelastic related to changes in travel time, while 6% were willing to switch due to airfare increases of 10%.     

Unravel the impact of COVID-19 on the spatio-temporal mobility patterns of microtransit

Shared mobility is an essential component of the larger sharing economy. Ride-hailing, bike-sharing, e-scooters, and other types of shared mobility continue to grow worldwide. Among these services is microtransit, a new transport mode that extends transit coverage within a region. Mobile devices enable microtransit services, aggregating riders and using real-time routing algorithms to group customers traveling in similar directions. Meanwhile, the newly emerged coronavirus, COVID-19, has radically reshaped the ridership behavior of all transit services, including microtransit. While existing research evaluates the performance of microtransit pilot programs before the pandemic, there is no information concerning the spatio-temporal pattern of microtransit activities under the impact of COVID-19. The purpose of this paper is to apply eigendecomposition and k-clique percolation methods to uncover the spatio-temporal patterns of microtransit trips. Further, we used these approaches to identify underlying communities using data from a pilot program in Salt Lake City, Utah. The resulting research offers insight into how COVID-19 altered travel behavior. Specifically, eigendecomposition delineated the homogeneity and heterogeneity of travel patterns across temporal dimensions. We identified first mile/last mile trips as a major source of variance in both pre- and post-COVID periods and that transit-dependent users prove to be inelastic despite the threat of COVID-19. The k-clique percolation method detected possible community formations and tracked how these communities evolved during the pandemic. In addition, we systematically analyzed overlapping communities and the network structure around shared nodes by using a clustering coefficient. The workflow developed in this research broadly is generalizable and valuable for understanding the unique spatio-temporal patterns of microtransit. The framework can also help transit agencies with performance evaluation, regional transport strategies, and optimal vehicle dispatching.     

Travel and tourism competitiveness index: The impact of air transportation,railways transportation,travel and transport services on international inbound and outbound tourism

The objective of the study is to examine the impact of air transportation, railways transportation, travel and transport services on international inbound and outbound tourism in a panel of 19 tourists - oriented countries, over a period of 1990–2014. By applying principal component analysis, the study constructs travel and tourism competitiveness index for inbound and outbound tourism. The main constructs of inbound tourism index include international tourists' arrival, tourism receipts, receipts of passengers' transports items and travel items while the constructs of the outbound index include international tourists' departure, tourism expenditures, and expenditures for passengers transport and travel items. The result of panel Fully Modified OLS (FMOLS) regression shows that the presence of air transportation, railways transportation, and trade openness positively affect inbound tourism index, while travel and transport services negatively affect tourism competitiveness index. The causality results confirm the bidirectional relationship between inbound tourism, air transportation, railways passengers carried, trade openness and travel and transport services, while there is a unidirectional causality running from inbound index to railway goods transported, from air transport freight to trade factor, and from travel services to air transport freight. Outbound tourism index confirmed the bidirectional causality relationship with air transportation, railways transportation, and travel and transport services, while the causality running from outbound index to trade factor, from air transport passenger carried to travel services, and from railway goods transported to trade and transport services, which support the unidirectional causality relationship between them. The variance decomposition results show that air transportation freight is the contributor that largely influences inbound-outbound tourism, while railways passengers carried and trade openness has the least share to influence inbound and outbound tourism index for the next 10-year period. The impulse response function indicates that air transportation, railways transportation, trade openness and travel services will positively impact on inbound truism while travel and transport services will positively affect outbound tourism for the next 10-year period. The study concludes with the importance of transportation sector that deem desirable to promote tourism worldwide. The concentration of different modes of transportation including air transportation, railways transportation, and travel and transport system would helpful to advance international tourism.     

Public transport trends in Australia during the COVID-19 pandemic: An investigation of the influence of bio-security concerns on trip behaviour

This paper draws on findings from an Australia-wide survey with data collected in three waves throughout 2020 to explore the impact of COVID-19 on public transport trends in metropolitan areas of Australia. Following consideration of the public transport sector response to the pandemic and the emerging literature context, we explore three principal questions: (i) How has weekly travel composition changed across the waves? (ii) How has level of concern with using public transport changed over the course of the pandemic given new bio-security concerns? and (iii) How has attitudes to risk been associated with the changes in PT use? A key finding is that concerns over bio-security issues around public transport are enduring, that concern about hygiene is significantly negatively related to public transport use and that those with higher concern about the hygiene of public transport also held higher concern about COVID-19 at work. Even as COVID-19 restrictions are eased, both concern about crowds and hygiene have a significant and negative correlation with public transport use. Concluding remarks are offered on what might need to happen for public transport patronage to start returning.     

Supporting the needs of special assistance (including PRM) passengers: An international survey of disabled air passenger rights legislation

Passengers who require special assistance at airports and on aircraft represent one of the fastest growing demographics for aviation worldwide. At some airports, annual growth in PRM (persons with reduced mobility) traffic is six times greater than the overall rate of passenger growth yet barriers to accessible air travel remain and disabled passengers continue to exhibit a lower propensity to fly than other travellers. In an attempt to aid disabled passengers’ accessibility to air travel, countries have introduced dedicated air passenger rights and consumer protection legislation which seeks to specifically address the needs of disabled travellers. These regulations typically state minimum service standards and levels of service provision that must be provided by air transport operators to enable disabled travellers to access air travel on an equal basis to other passengers. These legal interventions, however, have been developed on a country-by-country basis and this has created a lack of international regulatory alignment. This paper reports on the findings of an international survey of disabled air passenger rights legislation in 47 countries covering 20 aviation markets (the single market in the European Union and 19 other States). It identifies the differences in regulatory frameworks, highlights their implications for consumers and ultimately concludes by recommending the formation of more harmonised global policy making to better support the needs of special assistance passengers and facilitate their greater mobility by air.     

Airport user experience unpacked: Conceptualizing its potential in the face of COVID-19

Given the unprecedented challenges imposed on the aviation industry by the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper proposes a new perspective on airport user experience as a field of study to unlock its potential as a basis for strategic roadmapping. Through an integrative literature review, this study points out a dominant focus, in practice and research, on customer experience and service quality, as opposed to user experience, to help airports gain a competitive edge in an increasingly commoditized industry. The review highlights several issues with this understanding of experience, as users other than passengers, such as employees, working for the airport and its myriad stakeholders, as well as visitors, are largely omitted from study. Given the complexity of the system, operationally, passengers are generally reduced to smooth flows of a passive mass, which this study argues is both a missed opportunity and a vulnerability exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Major events apart from COVID-19 are used to show the negative effects this simplification of user experience has had. Based on solutions and models proposed in previous studies, a conceptual model has been developed to illustrate the postulated potential of a deeper and more holistic study of airport user experience to make airport systems generally more agile, flexible and future-proof. As such, the paper advocates to utilize the user experience as a basis for strategic planning to equip airports with the know-how to manage not just daily operations more effectively but also the aftermath of and recovery from major events like the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, with the user experience at the center of the strategic roadmap, airports can plan ahead to mitigate the impact of future scenarios. The importance of future research and the use of existing research are discussed.     

Lockdowned: Everyday mobility changes in response to COVID-19

BackgroundThis paper looks into the impact of the recent COVID-19 epidemic on the daily mobility of people. Existing research into the epidemic travel patterns points at transport as a channel for disease spreading with especially long-distance travel in the centre of interest. We adopt a different approach looking into the effects that epidemic has on the transport system and specifically in relation to short-distance daily mobility activities. We go beyond simple travel avoidance behaviours and look into factors influencing change in travel times and in modal split under epidemic. This leads to the research problems we posit in this paper. We look into the overall reduction of daily travel and into the factors impacting peoples' decisions to refrain from daily traveling. This paper focuses on modes affected and explores differences between various societal groups.MethodsWe use a CATI survey with a representative sample size of 1069 respondents from Poland. The survey was carried out between March, 24th and April, 6th2020, with a start date one week after the Polish government introduced administrative measures aimed at slowing down the COVID-19 epidemic. For data analysis, we propose using the GLM (general linear model), allowing us to include all the qualitative and quantitative variables which depict our sample.ResultsWe observe significant drops in travel times under epidemic conditions. Those drops are similar regardless of the age group and gender. The time decrease depended on the purpose of travels, means of transport, traveller's household size, fear of coronavirus, main occupation, and change in it caused by the epidemic. The more the respondent was afraid of coronavirus, the more she or he shortened the travel time.     

The business passenger niche: Comparing legacy carriers and southwest during a national recession

We examine how legacy and low-cost air carriers’ roles in serving business passengers in the US changed during the global economic recession from 2007. Quarterly data is examined to test the impact of a recession on the air travel behavior. We find that since 2007 business passengers represent a declining proportion of legacy carriers’ passenger volume, while they represent an increasing proportion of Southwest’s passengers. This trend suggests that Southwest’s market niche has shifted, and that the airline now plays a role similar to that of legacy carriers.     

突发事件对我国铁路客运量的干预特征研究

基于新冠肺炎疫情等突发事件对人们日常生活出行的影响,结合X-13ARIMASEATS季节调整模型的自动识别最优ARIMA模型和检测突发事件离群值功能,使用脉冲函数和阶梯函数设计基于离群值的突发事件的干预变量,构建铁路客运量的时间序列ARIMAX干预模型,对铁路客运量近年受到的SARS疫情、铁路客票实名制政策和新冠肺炎疫情等突发事件的冲击趋势进行干预比较分析。结果显示,SARS和新冠肺炎疫情对铁路客运量冲击较大,SARS疫情在冲击滞后的第5~6期铁路客运量基本得到恢复,新冠肺炎疫情对铁路客运量冲击一直在持续中,铁路客运实名制政策实施社会性较强,冲击具有波动性和不稳定性特征,持续时间较短;相对季节调整模型的趋势分析优势,干预模型拟合预测精度显著高于季节调整模型,预测显示我国铁路客运量在缓慢持续回暖中。     

Post pandemic aviation market recovery: Experience and lessons from China

China was the first aviation market in the world hit hard by COVID-19 and has been recovering gradually as the pandemic became largely under control within mainland China. This study reviews the recovery pattern influenced by the Chinese government's aviation policy choices, in the hope that our discussions and findings will help improve aviation policy responses elsewhere. While the domestic market in mainland China has enjoyed a quick recovery to about 80% of the pre-crisis level by July 2020, the recovery of international services has been much slower, due to the bilateral route and flight frequency/capacity control and strict requirements for health check and quarantine. China's domestic aviation market was recovered by about 80% in two months after the pandemic became under good control. Most other countries with a “curve flattening” strategy, instead of full pandemic control, may not expect the fast recovery path China has achieved. A British “travel corridor” approach may be more practical for Western countries to follow, albeit more likely to be subject to serious setbacks and disruptions. The aviation fee reductions and cost support China and many other countries have been using are helpful by reducing airlines' marginal costs, but not sufficient for carriers to return to profitability or sustainable operations. Capital injection and/or credit guarantee may be needed for many airlines to survive. With various, often uncoordinated, regulations imposed in international markets, airlines based in open economies that have small domestic markets will face particularly serious challenges during the recovery process.     

Government support to airlines in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic

This paper assesses government support measures to the air transport sector following the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic from two points of view. First, it explores the factors that shape governments’ willingness to support airlines. This is followed by a discussion on the various types of support that may be provided and how country-specific parameters influence the choice of measures. Second, it analyses the implications of government support in three dimensions relevant to air transport policy: competition and liberalisation, airline ownership and control, and environmental sustainability. The analysis suggests that most governments give a high priority to maintaining air transport connectivity in order to protect economic activity and jobs, in aviation itself and in related sectors such as tourism. The trade-off between ensuring connectivity and maintaining competition after the COVID-19 pandemic is a challenge with several political and economic dimensions. The re-orientation of public policy in the aftermath of the pandemic may limit the relative importance of the policy priorities that shaped the evolution of the air transport sector before the crisis, especially those related to climate change and the environment. The role of government and public authorities at all levels – especially the type and duration of measures affecting transport operations – will be crucial for the future development of the aviation industry.