Japanese international air travel: The relationship between flight ticket price and geodesic distance

This article considers the relationship between the price of flight tickets and their geodesic distance from the departure airport to the destination. Using the data collected from a Japanese flight booking site, I empirically investigated demand-supply situations from parameter estimates of an nth order polynomial function of the price in terms of the distance on each observation date. An adequate order of the polynomial function is determined by using two kinds of information criterions (AIC and BIC). It is confirmed that the ticket availability strongly depends on the Japanese calendar date and that the parameter estimates also depend on the calendar date. The parameter estimates may correspond to demand-supply situations of the Japanese air travel market.