Estimating Air-passengers’ Value of Travel Time Using Individual Mobile Phone Data

The value of travel time, the marginal monetary value you are willing to pay to save a unit of travel time, is commonly used in analysis of passenger behaviors and (pre)feasibility studies in transportation planning. It is also a critical factor in (pre)feasibility studies in airport planning as it is used to estimate benefits of time savings of a new project, the purpose of which is to reduce aircraft delays, relieve terminal congestion and improve ground access time. However, due to the limitations of data and lack of related studies, air-passengers’ value of travel time currently used is calculated by multiplying certain ratio to the surface transport passengers’ value of travel time. In this paper, the value of air-passengers’ travel time is estimated by using individual mobile phone data of people who traveled through Gimpo International airport. With mixed-logit, we revealed the travel time and the travel cost have significant effects on air-passengers’ access mode choice and the effect differs by gender, day of the week, and travel distance. The estimated average value of travel time of air-passengers is 21,874KRW/hr per person, which is 1.3-1.5 times higher value than the value of travel time generally used in (pre)feasibility studies in South Korea and also higher than the typical passenger car’s travel time value in the Seoul metropolitan area.