Institute of Transportation, MOTC

       The benefits of business aviation such as high privacy, high efficiency and high flexibility are cited as the most important factors for choosing it. Additionally, Taiwan and Mainland China signed an agreement to operate direct flights in 2008. Since then, the numbers of leisure travelers and business passengers have dramatically increased in the cross-strait market. Therefore, it is valuable to explore the employer’s preference toward providing his high-level executives to take business charter. Managements at the level of vice president or above in selected corporations are surveyed with stated-preference questionnaires, which are calibrated by a Binary Logit Model to investigate factors that influence their preferences. The results are also compared with the preferences of employees reported in literature to see whether or not the preferences of both groups, namely the employ and the employee, are different. Estimation results reveal that factors such as fare, the specialty of business charter, the purposes of using business charter, and the characteristics of the company have a bearing on the employer’s preference. These factors are very similar to the findings with regard to the preference of the employee reported by other research. Furthermore, this study also calculates the price elasticity of choice probability and finds that elasticities are different at various price levels.