Research On The Air Passengers’ Choice Behavior To Airline Paid Membership

In recent years,as a new member marketing system,paid membership system has become a new trend and has been successfully practiced in many industries.The membership system of China’s airlines is mostly the Frequent Flyer Program,with low entry threshold and insufficient loyalty of passengers.In 2019,West Air took the lead in launching PLUS membership,from which the airline paid membership system was born.Users can enjoy multiple rights and interests by paying membership fees.However,up to now,the paid membership system of airlines is still in the exploratory stage,and only West Air and China Express Airlines have tried to launch it.Although their marketing achievements are not small,the system rights and interests have undergone many changes,which is not conducive to the cultivation of long-term user trust.Meanwhile,in the post-COVID-19 era,airlines are exploring new profit growth points,and airlines can try to promote paid membership system.Based on this,this thesis is devoted to the study of air passengers’ choice behavior of airline paid membership,and puts forward marketing management suggestions for the development of airline paid membership in China.Firstly,the literature related to the choice behavior of air passengers and paying members at home and abroad is reviewed,and determined to carry out the research with the discrete choice experiment.Secondly,according to the actual rights and interests of Chinese airlines’ paid membership and the pre-research on the core users,six attribute indexes are selected:annual card price,ticket discount,free refund and change commission,free upgrade,extra free checked baggage and merchant discount,and the questionnaire is designed by using Ngene software.Finally,according to the data collected from the questionnaire,the Mixed Logit model is used to study the overall passengers’ choice behavior of airline paid membership,and calculate their willingness to pay and compensating surplus.On the basis of the clear heterogeneity of passengers’ preferences,the latent class model is used to further study the category of the total passengers,analyze the differential choice behavior of four categories of passengers,and draw corresponding conclusions.The results show that there is significant heterogeneity in air passengers’ preference for paying membership attributes of airlines.In addition to the annual card price,ticket discount,free refund or change commission,free upgrade,extra free checked baggage,and merchant discount will improve the utility of air passengers to varying degrees.Overall air passengers’ willingness to pay for ticket discount is the highest,reaching 141.84 yuan,and the willingness to pay for the other four rights and interests attributes is similar,between 60-90 yuan,passengers are willing to pay 974 yuan for an annual paid airline membership card with the highest interest level.According to latent class model,passenger groups can be divided into four categories,namely price sensitive type,stable enjoyment type,comfort pursuit type and strong security type.Different types of air passengers have differences in choice preference and willingness to pay.Based on the research results,some suggestions on the marketing management of airline paid membership are put forward at the end of this thesis.