Berghouwt, G., van der Flier, A. and de Wit, J. (2007) Solving the lack of price data availability in (European) aviation economics?, Airneth research memorandum 004-007, 20 June 2007

This paper was presented at the ATRS World Conference in June 2007 in Berkeley, California. This paper introduces a new and innovative method to solve the lack of ticket price data availability in aviation economics, by using internet booking websites. Ticket price databases do exist but cover primarily the US domestic and US international markets (e.g. 10% ticket sample).

Outside the US, "umbrella" databases on airfares are not accessible to researchers or are scarce and incomplete. The data handicap makes a number of analyses, such as the computation of welfare impacts of airport projects/mergers/network changes as well as price monitoring and benchmarking exercises difficult. This paper presents a new way of filling in the price data gap by introducing a web mining methodology in aviation economics, called Avifare. For both researchers and policy makers, Avifare may help to solve the lack of price data availability. Using an information extraction agent, Avifare automatically fills in internet booking websites and extracts and stores the search results in an output database. Airport-pairs, departure and return dates, fare class, number of connections etc. are predefined by the user of Avifare. Avifare is able to extract automatically per day, on average, the price data for 1900 airport pairs.

The conclusion can be drawn that web mining is a promising solution in order to solve the lack of price data in aviation economics, which is in particular relevant to aviation markets outside the US. Although the results of the pilot-study are promising, further research and development of Avifare is clearly needed. Given the large body of knowledge with respect to web mining in Computer Sciences and the available literature on ticket price dispersion in aviation, it is expected that these knowledge gaps can be filled in.