Research On The Air Passengers’ Choice Behavior To Branded Fare Products Based On Preference Heterogeneity

In recent years,the competition in China’s air passenger transport market has become increasingly fierce,and the heterogeneity of passenger preferences has become more and more prominent.In order to effectively respond to the heterogeneous preferences of passengers,airlines have launched differentiated services under a variety of scenarios.As one of the important means of differentiated services,branded fare product has been widely concerned by the industry because of its unique advantages.Chinese airlines began to introduce branded fare products in 2018 at the earliest,but so far most of them are still in the exploratory stage,with serious homogeneity among products,and fail to well meet the differentiated needs of passengers.Based on this,this paper aims to find out the heterogeneity of air passengers’ preferences by studying the behavior of air passengers’ choice of branded fare products,and based on this,puts forward some suggestions for the development of branded fare products for Chinese airlines.Firstly,the research of domestic scholars on passengers’ choice of air services,regional airports and other aspects is sorted out,and the choice experiment method is determined in this paper.Secondly,according to the development situation of branded fare products of Chinese airlines,six product attributes are selected,including price,free checked baggage,refund rate,early selection service,priority boarding service and free in-flight meals,and Ngene software is used to conduct selection experiment design.Finally,the sample data were collected by using the SP survey method,and the Mixed Logit model and Latent Class model were used to analyze the choice behavior of air passengers on brand fare products,after the heterogeneity preference and willingness to pay for various product attributes of passengers were found,the corresponding conclusions were drawn accordingly.The results show that the heterogeneity of air passengers’ preferences for branded fare products is very significant.In addition to the product price,free checked baggage,refund rate,early selection service,priority boarding service and free in-flight meals can all improve the utility of air passengers to different degrees.Overall air passengers’ willingness to pay for various attributes is at the level of about 30 yuan,priority boarding service had the highest willingness to pay and the in-flight meals had the lowest willingness to pay.According to the heterogeneous preference of air passengers,the passenger group can be divided into four types: stable enjoying type,price sensitive type,consignment enjoying type and flexible high-end type,different types of air passengers have different choice preference and willingness to pay.Based on the research results,this paper finally puts forward some suggestions on how to promote branded fare products more effectively.