Schedule delay impacts on air-travel itinerary demand

This paper examines air-travel itinerary share using aggregate multinomial logit models. The primary focus of this work is to assess the effectiveness of representing time of day preference by a continuous function and finding a preferred specification for the utility penalty of schedule delay, the difference between preferred and itinerary departure time. All other specification elements have been previously demonstrated. A base model representing time of day preference as a continuous function, using a weighted set of sin and cos curves is shown to reject representing time of day preference by a discrete function defined by time periods. An enhanced model, incorporating a penalty function for schedule delay which is non-linear increasing at an increasing rate over the first two hours and increasing at a decreasing rate thereafter, is found to be behaviorally and statistically superior to the base sin–cos model. This model is further differentiated between outbound and inbound passengers who are demonstrated to have very different time of day preferences.