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

PLoS One. 2023 Apr 26;18(4):e0284844. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0284844. eCollection 2023.

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.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Diarrhea*
  • Europe
  • Humans
  • Motivation*
  • Travel
  • Travel-Related Illness

Grants and funding

This work was supported in part by Ride2Rail project financed from the Shift2Rail Joint Undertaking under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 881825. L.B. and M.S. were in part supported by project VEGA 1/0077/22 - Innovative prediction methods for optimisation of public service systems, APVV-19-0441 Allocation of limited resources to public service systems with conflicting quality criteria and in part by the Operational Program Integrated Infrastructure 2014-2020 Innovative Solutions for Propulsion, Power, and Safety Components of Transport Vehicles" through the European Regional Development Fund under grant ITMS313011V334. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.