Exploring college students’ purchasing strategies for trip ticket in Chinese Spring Festival using a sequential stated adaptation experiment: three comparative modeling approaches

ABSTRACT

One specific phenomenon in the Spring Festival travel rush in China is that purchasing a train ticket becomes tough as the train tickets could be sold out extremely soon. Therefore, the current paper presents an analysis of college students’ trip ticket purchasing strategies for homecoming trips during Chinese Spring Festival using a sequential stated adaptation experiment, based on which three different choice models were applied and the results show that 1) college students would keep purchasing the ticket of planned train trip and this willingness would decrease with the increasing of the times they fail to get the ticket; 2) if college students decide to give up the conventional train trip they have planned, they have a tendency to choose other conventional train trips, but it is not the case regarding high-speed train trips; 3) air itinerary trips are attractive alternatives to trains trips, especially to high-speed train trips.

KEYWORDS:

• Spring Festival travel rush
• ticket purchasing strategy
• college students
• sequential stated adaptation experiment
• heterogeneity

Acknowledgement

The first author would like to thank the support from the Project of Wuhan Talent 2021 (20221jb029), and the second author would like to thank the supports from the Opening Project of Key Laboratory of operation safety technology on transport vehicles, Ministry of Transport, PRC (KFKT2017-01, KFKT2018-04).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Data collected in the website of National Development and Reform Commission of the PRC (www.ndrc.gov.cn).

2. Although the current paper and authors’ previous papers share the same survey, their differences are significant. The first paper aims to investigate college students’ choice preferences for homecoming train trips during the Chinese Spring Festival, the second one focuses on the effect of travelers’ perceived image toward high-speed railway in the context of homecoming train trip choice, and the current one tries to explore college students’ ticket purchasing strategies rather than their trip choice behavior.

3. URL of this forum: https://bbs.pinggu.org/.

4. Strictly speaking, it should be conditional logit model (CLM). A model with alternative-specific variables is not an MNL but a CLM. An MNL model has variables related to the decision maker, not related to the choice. However, this difference was much emphasized in the early years. Nowadays this has disappeared and many people in transportation talk about MNL which would be CLM. In this sense, we keep the term ‘multinomial logit model’ or ‘MNL’ in this paper in order to avoid confusions for readers in transportation community.

5. Sometimes, it is also called generalized logit model.

6. For the MMNL-S model, the estimates of means are actually used.