Journal of Korean Society of TransportationISSN:1229-1366(Print) 2234-4217(Online)대한교통학회

With the increase of overseas travelers and the emergence of low-cost carriers based in the provincial airports, it is expected that the outbound air travelers’ airport choices concentrated in the Seoul metropolitan area will change. Accurate forecasting of such travelers’ airport choice behavior is a key factor in the evaluation of new airport construction and expansion projects that require huge costs. In this study, the airport choice behavior of outbound air travelers was analyzed by applying multinomial logit model. The model estimation used international passenger statistics collected correctly during immigration procedures. However, these data are aggregated by residence and travel country, not disaggregate observations of individual travelers commonly used in estimating discrete choice models. Therefore, two different models were developed for estimating the multinomial logit model by using airport selection ratios and number of passengers per airport. Based on the statistical significance and the value-of-time estimates, the model using the number of passengers per airport, which is a method of using repeated observation data for the same person, is presented as the optimal airport choice model. The real-world applicability of the selected airport choice model was verified by applying it to the case of the Gimhae new airport under construction.