Impacts of high-speed rail fare discount strategies on travel frequency of the passengers in China

Through adjusting ticket fare and refund reasonably, the high-speed rail (HSR) fare discount strategy aims to improve passengers’ HSR travel frequency. In this paper, a binomial logit model with references is established to study the impacts of the ticket fare and refund variations relative to the references derived from current HSR ticket pricing strategy on different passengers’ HSR travel frequency growth. Thereafter, the surveyed data for HSR passengers between Beijing and Shanghai is collected to estimate the proposed model whose results show that the ticket fare discount strategy has different impacts on HSR travel frequency growth for passengers with different genders and occupations. That is, male civil servants, public institutions employees and enterprise staffs are least likely to change their travel frequencies due to the change of ticket fare or refund. And the discounted ticket fare has a more significant impact for HSR passengers to increase their travel frequencies compared with refund. Specifically, the influence degree of ticket fare on the HSR travel frequency growth is 5~8 times higher than which of refund. Moreover, the sensitive analysis indicates that the refund can increase the probability of HSR travel frequency growth about 10.56%~30.25% for different groups of passengers.