Willingness to pay (WTP) for leisure air travel: From WTP analysis to the conception of the 3-plane interaction model (3-PIM) as decision-making tool for airline management

• Knowing customers' willingness to pay (WTP) is essential for airlines to drive revenues. • Research often covers WTP of single air travel attributes, but a holistic view is missing. • Competition, sociodemographic and psychographic criteria influence WTP. • This article uses the case of Edelweiss Air to develop a model (3-PIM) to determine the WTP for a flight and its features, considering the specific competitive environment. • The model further differentiates the WTP among the sociodemographic and psychographic dimensions and the presented case studies show how the model can be implemented in practice. This paper presents a dual purpose: examining the willingness to pay (WTP) of the Swiss German leisure air travel market from the perspective of Edelweiss Air and establishing a practicable replicable method implementable by every airline to assess the WTP in their context. To examine the WTP the components of a leisure flight are broken down into attributes and levels. Those are used in an adaptive choice-based conjoint analysis (ACBC) survey to establish the WTP for each attribute level. Sociodemographic and psychographic data of participants is also collected to be crossed with the resulting WTP. The interaction of the psychographic, sociodemographic, and situational dimension (expressed in WTP) is represented into the three-plane interaction model (3-PIM). Through the 3-PIM, different insights are gathered and presented across the three dimensions. The insights obtained highlight the utility of the collected data for Edelweiss Air and underline the utility of the 3-PIM model as a decision-making tool for airlines. The paper terminates by presenting different case studies in which the 3-PIM model with the data collected can be valuably used, and by outlining how the 3-PIM model can be implemented within an airline as a decision-making support tool.