Exploring the potential for cross-nesting structures in airport-choice analysis: A case-study of the Greater London area

The analysis of air-passengers’ choices of departure airport in multi-airport regions is a crucial component of transportation planning in many large metropolitan areas, and has been the topic of an increasing number of studies over recent years. In this paper, we advance the state of the art of modelling in this area of research by making use of a Cross-Nested Logit (CNL) structure that allows for the joint representation of inter-alternative correlation along the three choice dimensions of airport, airline and access-mode. The analysis uses data collected in the Greater London area, which arguably has the highest levels of inter-airport competition of any multi-airport region; the authors of this paper are not aware of any previous effort to jointly analyse the choice of airport, airline and access-mode in this area. The results of the analysis reveal significant influences on passenger behaviour by access-time, access-cost, flight-frequency and flight-time. A structural comparison of the different models shows that the cross-nested structure offers significant improvements over simple Nested Logit (NL) models, which in turn outperform the Multinomial Logit (MNL) model used as the base model.