Exploring college students’ purchasing strategies for trip ticket in Chinese Spring Festival using a sequential stated adaptation experiment: three comparative modeling approaches

Abstract

One specific phenomenon in the Spring Festival travel rush in China is that purchasing a train ticket becomes tough as the train tickets could be sold out extremely soon. Therefore, the current paper presents an analysis of college students’ trip ticket purchasing strategies for homecoming trips during Chinese Spring Festival using a sequential stated adaptation experiment, based on which three different choice models were applied and the results show that 1) college students would keep purchasing the ticket of planned train trip and this willingness would decrease with the increasing of the times they fail to get the ticket; 2) if college students decide to give up the conventional train trip they have planned, they have a tendency to choose other conventional train trips, but it is not the case regarding high-speed train trips; 3) air itinerary trips are attractive alternatives to trains trips, especially to high-speed train trips.