A new approach to identify the target market of new gateway airports

Abstract

Benefiting from the Belt and Road initiative, China experiences the flourishing cross-border trading and tourism. Meanwhile, explosive air transport demand arises in Chinese Bay Area as its strategic position on the Belt and Road. As an important infrastructure in Chinese Bay Area, Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge has connected Zhuhai airport and Hong Kong airport. As a result, we firstly propose a new international transfer mode called "air-bus-air". In order to identify the target market of "air-bus-air", a path choice model is established integrating multinomial logit model and latent class model and validated by path choice data. Test results indicate that a latent class model with three segments performs best and this method is effective in improving the accuracy of market segmentation.