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.     

The negative effects of travel friction among road warrior salespeople

Dubbed as road warriors in the popular press, there is a select group of business traveling dealmakers that take at least four trips by commercial airline and stay in hotels at least thirty-five nights in a given year. These high value employees have often been subjected to cost-focused travel policies potentially to the detriment of their well-being. From a theoretical viewpoint, the boundaries of the existing sales literature are expanded to show how this unique group of salespeople, road warriors, face stressors and how these relate to major sales focused outcomes (job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and turnover intentions). Further, this study adds an additional construct, travel friction, into the literature, yielding support for the importance of developing our understanding of this construct. Travel friction is found as a significant antecedent to both work-family conflict and emotional exhaustion. Moreover, through emotional exhaustion both travel friction and work-family conflict ultimately manifest in reduced job satisfaction, diminished organizational commitment, and increased attrition risk. The lack of business travel in the short-term due to the global pandemic offers corporate travel managers a unique opportunity to pause and recalibrate their travel policies to focus more on traveler well-being. Practical suggestions from travel experts that can potentially help to mitigate travel friction among road warriors are offered.     

Distance traveled in three Canadian cities: Spatial analysis from the perspective of vulnerable population segments

The objective of this paper is to investigate the factors that influence distance traveled by individuals in Canadian urban areas, with a particular focus on three population segments thought to face the risk of mobility challenges: the elderly, low-income people, and members of single-parent households. Data obtained for three large urban centers - Hamilton, Toronto, and Montreal - are analyzed using spatial expansion models, a technique used to obtain spatially-varying coefficients that help to tease out contextual person-location variations in travel behavior. Detailed geographical results help to enhance our understanding of the spatiality of travel behavior of the population segments of interest. Substantively, the results provide evidence of significant interactions between location, various demographic factors, and mobility tools. More specifically, the results evince patterns of mobility that are significantly different from the mainstream population, particularly in suburban settings, in ways that are indicative of mobility challenges.     

The choice of air carrier, flight, and fare class

This paper reports the development and interpretation of air traveler choice models to gain insights into the tradeoffs air travelers make when they choose among different carriers, flights, and fare classes. Such insights can be used to support carrier decisions on flight scheduling, pricing, seat allocation, and ticket restrictions. This paper develops a conceptual framework and applies it to the choice of carrier, flight, and fare class as a basis for analyzing air travel demand in a competitive market. Model estimation results are used to quantify the importance of carrier preferences, market presence, quality of service, frequent flyer program membership, schedule convenience, and fares on carrier travel demand. The empirical results provide measures of the premium that business and leisure travelers are willing to pay to avoid schedule delays, to choose a carrier in which frequent-flyer program they participate, and to obtain the amenities and freedom from travel restrictions associated with higher fare classes.     

Assessing the road safety impacts of a teleworking policy by means of geographically weighted regression method

Travel demand management (TDM) consists of a variety of policy measures that affect the effectiveness of transportation systems by changing travel behavior. The primary objective of such TDM strategies is not to improve traffic safety, although their impact on traffic safety should not be neglected. The main purpose of this study is to simulate the traffic safety impact of conducting a teleworking scenario (i.e. 5% of the working population engages in teleworking) in the study area, Flanders, Belgium. Since TDM strategies are usually conducted at a geographically aggregated level, crash prediction models should also be developed at an aggregate level. Given that crash occurrences are often spatially heterogeneous and are affected by many spatial variables, the existence of spatial correlation in the data is also examined. The results indicate the necessity of accounting for the spatial correlation when developing crash prediction models. Therefore, zonal crash prediction models (ZCPMs) within the geographically weighted generalized linear modeling framework are developed to incorporate the spatial variations in association between the number of crashes (including fatal, severe and slight injury crashes recorded between 2004 and 2007) and other explanatory variables. Different exposure, network and socio-demographic variables of 2200 traffic analysis zones (TAZs) are considered as predictors of crashes. An activity-based transportation model framework is adopted to produce detailed exposure metrics. This enables to conduct a more detailed and reliable assessment while TDM strategies are inherently modeled in the activity-based models. In this study, several ZCPMs with different severity levels and crash types are developed to predict crash counts for both the null and the teleworking scenario. The results show a considerable traffic safety benefit of conducting the teleworking scenario due to its impact on the reduction of total vehicle kilometers traveled (VKT) by 3.15%. Implementing the teleworking scenario is predicted to reduce the annual VKT by 1.43 billion and the total number of crashes to decline by 2.6%.     

Parking enforcement and travel demand management

This article deals with on-street, non-free parking policy. The aim is to show how parking meter violation challenges the travel demand management policy. The literature widely admits that only the increase in the enforcement effort both deters drivers from offending and contribute to moderating car use. Nevertheless, the link between parking non-compliance, enforcement effort and travel demand has never been examined. We show that when parking meter violation behaviour, fine level choice, modal split and travel demand are connected, the fine increase paradoxically supports car use and encourages parking violation in the case of large parking congestion in particular.     

机场进出场客流量分配模型及方法研究

以机场出发旅客为研究对象,分析不同交通方式下旅客进出场出行成本对交通方式选择的影响,构建了机场进出场不同交通方式下交通工具选择的均衡配流模型,并设计了求解该模型的灵敏度分析方法.构建模型主要基于旅客的选择行为,能够定量反映不同交通工具出行费用与其流量分担率间的变化关系.算例结果表明,构建的模型及其求解方法可行、有效.     

U.S. Tour Operators and Travel Agencies

Abstract

The purpose of the study reported in this paper was to explore the services and package tours for people who have difficulty walking provided by U.S. tour operators and travel agencies, and to identify barriers encountered when planning and operating the tours. Accommodations and eating-drinking establishments were the least desirable environments for people who have difficulty walking due to inaccessibility and negative staff attitudes. Attractions and transportation staff displayed higher attitudes but facilities were not accessible. The graphical display of data of accessibility barriers and staff attitude barriers indicated that the four tourism sectors did not comply with the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.     

Improving tourism policy implementation - The use of hybrid MCDM models

Few studies have presented a holistic approach to evaluating complex national tourism policies, successfully quantified the dynamics at play, or proposed an improvement model. The corresponding purpose of this study is to address this problem, using the method of hybrid MCDM (multiple criteria decision-making) to examine the dependent relationships among various dimensions and criteria of tourism policies and, ultimately, to suggest an optimal improvement plan for Taiwan tourism policy. A decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL) is employed to construct a network relationship map (NRM), which then is used to illustrate the influential network of the tourism policy improvement model. The DEMATEL-based analytic network process (DANP) and VIKOR are adopted to evaluate the weights and the gaps to the aspired level of implementation. The model is useful in identifying both an influential network and a priority sequence of dimensions/criteria related to tourism policies and, thus, is helpful to tourism policy management.     

文物景区游憩价值评估的旅行费用法与收益法应用比较——以凤凰山景区为例

游憩价值评估研究领域一直缺乏对文物景区的关注．评估文物景区游憩价值时要考虑其文物、古建筑吸引物的空间容量受限、景观展示方式单调、愿意支付群体受限等基本特性的影响．以凤凰山景区为例,选取了旅行费用法和收益法分别对其游憩价值进行评价．结果显示：应用旅行费用法评估得到2010年景区游憩价值为11．2亿元人民币,应用收益法评估得到景区可预见经营期内的总游憩价值为108．12亿元人民币。收益法评估值相对偏低．两种评估方法的共同点是理论基础都是效用价值论,都反映了评估对象为权利主体人所能带来的效用价值;不同的是旅行费用法是从游客支出的角度进行评估,需要进行严密的游客调查设计,因其考虑到“消费者剩余”部分而使评估更全面、可靠;收益法则是从景区收益的角度进行评估。操作简便易行．但受主观因素影响较大．