‘Wild Your weekends' promotion and its effect on traffic recovery during COVID-19 pandemic

Linfeng Zhang, Hangjun Yang, Kun Wang, Lei Bian, Anming Zhang

Research output: Journal article publicationJournal articleAcademic researchpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

China Eastern Airlines launched a ‘Wild Your Weekends' programme offering buyers an unlimited number of free trips during weekends, which is unprecedented in the Chinese airline market and also rare around the world. However, it is unclear whether such a promotion is effective in improving airlines’ liquidity. This study adopts the difference-in-differences (DID) method to empirically examine the impacts of this promotion programme on traffic volumes, ticket prices and revenues of China Eastern and its competitors. Our estimations suggest that this programme has overall helped China Eastern improve its liquidity. On one hand, the carrier was forced to lower prices on weekends, probably because passengers formed strong beliefs on China Eastern’s low price due to its promotion programme, and felt psychologically unfair by paying high prices as compared to the programme’s users. This decreased China Eastern’s revenue from non-programme passengers on weekends.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1206-1224
Number of pages19
JournalTransportmetrica B
Volume10
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2022
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • airline liquidity
  • COVID-19
  • difference-in-differences (DID)
  • price promotion

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Modelling and Simulation
  • Transportation

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