Airport Choice in Multi-airport Regions: An Empirical Study for Chinese Metropolitan Area

In this paper, a multinomial logit (MNL) model is constructed to predict airport choice in a multiple-airport region and estimated using passenger data from Chinese metropolitan area. Four explanatory variables were investigated, namely, access time to the airports of choice, airline service (mainly flight frequencies) at the regional airports, airfare, and a passenger´s experience with an airport. In agreement with previous work, it was found that flight frequency is one of the significant predictors of airport choice. However, our estimation results indicate that not access time but airfare is another important predictor in the competition between airports in a developing countrypsilas region. Travelers in developing countries have higher airfare elasticity than those in developed countries, while travelers in developed countries have higher access time elasticity than those in developing countries. In addition, a passenger´s experience is significant in the airport choice behavior in both developed and developing countries. This would indicate that passengers who have used an airport will tend to continue to use the same airport, all other factors being equal.