Study of travellers’ preferences towards travel offer categories and incentives in the journey planning context

Abstract

Nowadays, efforts to encourage changes in travel behaviour towards eco-friendly and active modes of transport are intensifying. A promising solution is to increase the use of sustainable public transport modes. Currently, a significant challenge related to this solution is the implementation of journey planners that will inform travellers about available travel solutions and facilitate decision-making by using personalisation techniques. This paper provides some valuable hints to journey planner developers on how to define and prioritise the travel offer categories and incentives to meet the travellers’ expectations. The analysed data were obtained from a survey conducted in several European countries as part of the H2020 RIDE2RAIL project. The results confirm that travellers prefer to minimise travel time and stay on time. Also, incentives such as price discounts or class upgrades may play a crucial role in influencing the choices among travel solutions. By applying the regression analysis, it was found that preferences of travel offer categories and incentives are correlated with some demographic or travel-related factors. The results also show that subsets of significant factors strongly differ for particular travel offer categories and incentives, what underlines the importance of personalised recommendations in journey planners.