Abstract
To serve more markets for supporting its sustainable development, Zhuhai airport tends to act as a new gateway by providing an air–bridge–air path that links its domestic network to the international air routes of Hong Kong Airport, through surface transportation via the Hongkong–Zhuhai–Macao Bridge. In order to identify the target passengers using the new gateway service, this paper proposes a market segmentation approach which incorporates the heterogeneity among passengers in the choice of the air–bridge–air route and explicitly incorporates people’s curiosity about the new service. A latent class choice model incorporating passengers’ curiosity is developed to identify the market segments of the new gateway service offered by Zhuhai Airport. The model is estimated using the stated preference data collected in 12 Chinese cities. The results indicate that people who have a high level of curiosity and/or are price sensitive prefer to use the new gateway service. Meanwhile, some segment-specific strategies of improving the new gateway service are proposed for the sustainable development of domestic airports which have the desire to cooperate with nearby hubs.
Highlights
Sustainable development of airports, especially small-scale airports, requires the continual adaptation of air services to serve more markets
In one work written by Dev Jani that we find has close relation to our study, the author figures out that passengers always possess the interest-type curiosity in travelling [44], which means that people would feel “anticipated pleasure of new discoveries or experiences”, as defined by Litman and Jimerson in 2004 [45]
The results show that the willingness to discover or travel to new places has the highest loading in the measurement, and the self-drive to explore the unknown is important in measuring the level of curiosity [41]
Summary
Sustainable development of airports, especially small-scale airports, requires the continual adaptation of air services to serve more markets This often involves the creation of new connecting services. The potential connectivity of airports can be vastly increased through ground links, allowing passengers to fly into one airport and to travel by surface modes to another airport from which they resume their air journey [1]. For such services to be viable, they must be acceptable to air travelers. We want to assess air travelers’ willingness to try such services based on a case study involving Zhuhai and Hong Kong airports, which have recently been connected by the Hongkong–Zhuhai–Macao Bridge [4]
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