Importance of direct flight connections between Switzerland and the Far East: A Logistic Choice Model

This paper is about the importance of purchasing criteria in intercontinental air transport as exemplified by origin and destination between Switzerland and selected destinations in the Far East.
Passengers waiting to board their flights from Switzerland to Far Eastern destinations were invited to participate in a choice experiment. Subsequently, they were offered choice sets where they had to choose among two different flight tickets from Zurich to one specific destination within each set. To statistically analyse the data a variance decomposition method was performed to learn about the importance of the different purchasing criteria.
The results show that for both the business and economy class passengers alike and the business and leisure travellers the most important criteria is the price, even before the direct connection, which is the second most important criteria. In comparison with transatlantic travellers, the Far East travellers value the direct flight more and the price is a somewhat less important.