Continuous Departure Time of Day Preferences for Continental U.S. Airline Markets Segmented by Distance, Direction of Travel, Number of Time Zones, Day of Week and Itinerary Type

Airlines use itinerary choice models to allocate the total number of passengers in a city pair to specific itineraries. In a related paper, we estimated a multinomial logit (MNL) itinerary choice model using database of more than 3 million tickets for Continental U.S. markets provided by the Airlines Reporting Corporation that accounted for price endogeneity. The size and comprehensiveness of our database allowed us to estimate highly refined continuous departure time of day preference curves that account for distance, direction of travel, the number of time zones traversed, departure day of week and itinerary type (outbound, inbound or one-way). This paper and accompanying Excel spreadsheet located at http://garrowlab.ce.gatech.edu contain the results of all model coefficients (including the 1260 time of day parameters) and summarize results in a series of ten figures. These highly-refined time of day preference curves can be used by airlines, researchers, and government organizations in the evaluation of demand-management and other policies.