A study of Korean air passengers' choice behaviour utilising stated preference and revealed preference methods

Air travellers' choice behaviour is fundamental to air transport system planning. The Korean international air travel market is at an expansion stage. The objective of this study is to research the choice behaviour of Korean people for their international trips. The flight choice for long distance international travel, which takes more than ten hours of air journey time was studied through analysing stated preference (SP) data as well as revealed preference (RP) data, which were gathered by the survey of this research. The study identified the major factors influencing flight choice in the market and their relative importance by constructing logit models. Separate logit models have been calibrated with RP data and with SP data. The final conclusion was obtained from a comparison of the SP and RP model, and complementary interpretation of the results of RP data and SP data analysis. The major findings of the study are; (1) identification of journey time, air fare, service frequency, and nationality of airline as major factors influencing passengers' flight choice in the market. It is remarked that Korean nationality of airline is considerably preferred in the market. Most Koreans are not fluent in foreign languages, especially English or other European languages, and they are not accustomed to Western culture, and this results in their preference for Korean airlines. (2) estimation of the value of travel time, and other relative importance of variables. For RP data, not only coefficients of the model, but also intellectual interpretation of the data themselves was conducted because some coefficients of the RP model were not statistically significant.