报告题目：Air Travel Choice, Online Meeting and Passenger Heterogeneity - What shall be done for the aviation industry?

报告所属学科：管理科学与工程

报告人：Xiaowen Fu（The Hong Kong Polytechnic University）

报告时间：2023年11月20日 10:00-12:00

报告地点：腾讯会议 687 593 742

报告摘要：

This study empirically identifies business travellers’ preferences during the COVID-19 pandemic across different regions. A stated preference study was conducted during April to June 2021 on respondents in the U.S., the city of Shanghai in mainland China and Hong Kong. Generalised mixed multinomial logit (GMXL) models are estimated incorporating attributes of travel characteristics, severity levels of the pandemic, and health control measures at the airport. When an online meeting is inapplicable, respondents from Shanghai and Hong Kong highly value heath control measures, and are not sensitive to the time spent at airport health checkpoints. In comparison, U.S. respondents are averse to the time spent for health check, the reporting of personal information, travel history, symptoms, and the requirements of compulsory mask wearing and onsite sample testing. However, when online meeting is applicable, all the respondents show no appreciation for health control measures, while the U.S. respondents are twice more averse to the time spent at airport health checkpoints. Online meeting reduces the intention of international business travel amid the pandemic for passengers in Shanghai and Hong Kong, but imposes no significant effects on U.S. travellers. Such significant heterogeneity in traveller preference partly explains the different recovery patterns observed in various aviation markets, and justifies individualized travel arrangements and service priority in fulfilling pandemic control requirements across different regions. Our study also suggests that there are commonly accepted areas for global cooperation such as the sharing of vaccination record, and the option of online meeting calls for convenient travel arrangements amid pandemic to all countries.

报告人简介：

Professor Xiaowen Fu is the Head of Department and Professor in Engineering Management at the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. His main research area is transport economics and management, which cover issues such as competition policy and government regulation, international aviation liberalization, efficiency benchmarking, transport demand modelling and industrial organization. He has been the principal investigator of more than 20 research grants, the guest editor of 7 journal special issues, and the author of more than 100 journal articles. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Case Studies on Transport Policy, associate editor of the book series “Advances in Airlines Economics”. Prof. Fu has provided advisory and economic modeling services to organizations such as the Boeing Commercial Aircraft, New Zealand Commerce Commission, Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Government of British Columbia in Canada, Australian Competition Tribunal, Hong Kong Civil Aviation Department, Hong Kong Transport and Housing Bureau, Greater Bay Airlines, Japan Rail (East), and OECD. He is the director of the Behavior and Knowledge Engineering Research Center, Vice President (Research) of the Air Transport Research Society (ATRS), Vice President (Research) of the Institute for Aviation (UK), founding chair of the Maritime Economy and Policy stream of the World Transport Convention, member of the Technical and Statistical Task Team on the Productive Capacities Index under the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and an honorary professor of the University of Sydney Business School.