Identifying Behavior Patterns in Intercity Coach Passenger Ticketing across Multiple Channels and Stages

Coach travel is the most extensive travel mode for intercity passenger transportation in China. A multiple channel ticketing strategy has been widely employed in this industry. This affects the ticketing behaviors and patterns of road passengers, yet few transportation studies have investigated ticketing behavior pattern issues. This study thus used Beijing intercity coach transportation as a case study to identify behavior patterns and to analyze the characteristics of road passengers. The ticketing process is divided into two stages: ticket purchase and ticket pick-up. Based on the data of the road passenger transport networking ticketing system in Beijing, we develop a Latent Class Model (LCM) that incorporates passenger socio-economic characteristics, travel characteristics, and coach service frequency. The findings of this study show that road passenger ticketing can be categorized into three patterns: “ticket purchasing and pick-up at the same time (PP)”, “ticketing online and offline (OO)”, and “ticketing anytime and anywhere (AA)”. Moreover, the result also shows that the pattern of passenger ticketing is affected by gender, age, income, advance time of ticketing, and service frequency. The conclusions of this study have implications for intercity coach operators looking to design precision ticketing channel services for certain types of passengers.