Research on Marketing Strategy of Railway Passenger Travel Behaviour Analysis in Competitive Section

Abstract

The deep mining of passengers’ travel data can identify competitive segments and gain insights into passengers’ characteristics and differentiated demands. This can not only effectively support precise marketing strategy adjustment of railway transport but also improve its competitiveness in the passenger transportation market. In this paper, hidden railway travel behaviour is introduced and integrated with railway travel behaviour to create a complete passenger travel chain, based on existing distance-based competitive segment recognition methods. The loyalty index values of passengers are calculated using this travel chain to identify competitive segments. Furthermore, passenger classification and grouping currently ignore social relationships as well as personal travel characteristics. Therefore, a novel passenger grouping method is proposed; it integrates individuals’ travel characteristics and social relations. Individual travel labels are created for travellers based on their travel data. Social relation topologies, such as ticketing relation, the relation of travelling together, and benefit relation via point redemption, can be extracted using these labels. Social relation traits can be retrieved using graph attention networks and multigraph fusion. Finally, travellers are categorised based on their individual travel characteristics. As an example, and a case study, the grouping of Guangzhou–Shanghai passengers in 2020 is taken which shows that the suggested method has the potential to improve both the precision and the feasibility of grouping railway passengers. As a result, new ideas for passenger grouping in railway marketing might be offered.