Airport Choice, Leakage, and Experience in Single-Airport Regions

Abstract

Airport leakage refers to the phenomenon where travelers in small, single-airport regions avoid using their local (nearest) airports and prefer to use the more distant but larger metropolitan airports. Past studies of airport choice did not consider airport leakage tendencies of air travelers in single-airport regions, nor considered how the choice probabilities of individual travelers are affected by the goodness or badness of the travelers’ experiences with one or more of the candidate airports. This paper extends the research on airport choice by considering the airport leakage tendencies of travelers in single-airport regions, and by incorporating variables that capture the individuals’ heterogeneity of airport experience. The results indicate that single-airport area travelers are more likely to leak to larger metropolitan airports when their trip purpose is leisure than when it is business, and that travelers are more likely to choose the airports in which they gained good experiences than those which they have never used or had bad experiences.