Determinants of Bus Passengers' Loyalty: A Multinomial Logit Regression Approach

Increasing the ridership always receives much attention from public transit agencies. Beside of studies in which researchers focus on determining factors affecting the new customer attraction as well as encouraging customers to shift to public transport (PT) from many other travel modes, transit users' loyalty is considered an emerging approach in order to retain existing customers and attract potential ones. This study used the data conducted from 873 bus users in Viet Nam to identify the factors that affect customers' loyalty in the context of developing countries. A multinomial logit model (MLM) was developed to examine the association passengers' loyalty and affecting factors, including social-economic attributes, trip characteristics and psychological factors. Results revealed that perceived service quality (PSQ) and experience on bus (EXB) play a critical role in transit user loyalty. Other factors such as perceived image (IMA), perceived health benefits (PHB), perceived environmental value (PEV), perceived similarity (SIM) and perceived suitable behavior (SBE), married status and frequency of trips also have significant impacts on passengers' loyalty toward PT system. Whereas, trip purpose, travel time, income and gender have no effect on the user loyalty.