International travel patterns: exploring destination preferences and airfare trends to and from the USA

ABSTRACT

Approximately one quarter of all U.S. air-passenger trips (involving US airlines only) are to and from foreign destinations, which accounted for around 4.5% of total US person-miles in 2019. Travel demand modeling and US travel surveys often overlook this overseas travel. Therefore, this study assesses travel demand, patterns, and costs (in time and money) between major US and foreign airports worldwide, as well as ground trips to Mexico and Canada, using 2019 DB1B flight ticket data, the 2016–2017 National Household Travel Survey (NHTS), and border crossing data. A model of trip distribution, from 334 US airports to 1,028 foreign airports, shows how trip flows fall about 41% with every 7-hour increase in flight start to end time. Destinations hosting tourist attractions (e.g, London, Barcelona, Milan, Paris, Dubai) are also a practically significant variable in the model, increasing flows by 48%. Flight fares (for one-way itineraries) increase by $0.078 per mile for coach class and $0.163 per mile for business class and higher, according to feasible generalized least-squares models. These fares are higher for English-speaking destinations than non-English-speaking destinations, as well as for trips from April to June (as compared to January to March with similar distances and flight classes).

KEYWORDS:

• International travel
• demand modeling
• air fare
• destination choice

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) for financially supporting this research, under research project 0-7081, ‘Understanding the Impact of Autonomous Vehicles on Long Distance Travel Mode and Destination Choice in Texas’ and Aditi Bhaskar for her editing and administrative support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

The authors confirm contribution to the paper as follows: study conception and design: Fakhrmoosavi, F., Kockelman, Paithankar, P., Perrine, K.; data collection: Perrine, K., Kockelman; analysis and interpretation of results: Paithankar, P., Fakhrmoosavi, F., and Kockelman; draft manuscript preparation: Paithankar, P., Fakhrmoosavi, F., Kockelman; All authors reviewed the results and approved the final version of the manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Texas Department of Transportation under Project number 0-7081.