Study on the Effect of Air–Rail Intermodal Transportation Ticket Pricing Considering Social Welfare

Air–rail intermodal transportation, as an important mode of transportation, can increase social welfare and reduce passenger travel costs with a reasonable ticket pricing strategy. This paper treats air–rail intermodal transportation as an independent product and studies the changes in social welfare and passenger travel costs after the introduction of this transportation mode into the transportation corridor. A bi-objective programming model is constructed to represent social welfare with producer surplus and consumer surplus. Taking the Chengdu–Shijiazhuang–Beijing transportation corridor as a case study, the results show that when the air–rail intermodal transportation ticket price is in the range of CNY (963.50, 1,130.16), it can help increase passenger flow, enhance total social welfare, reduce passengers’ generalized travel costs, and ensure the active cooperation of both the air and rail enterprises through revenue sharing. Taking the air–rail intermodal transportation ticket price of CNY 1,082.46 as an example, it can increase the corridor’s passenger flow by 1.15%, enhance social welfare by 1.72%, reduce passengers’ generalized travel costs by 1.61%, and boost the total ticket revenue of airlines by 2.72% while maintaining the original ticket revenue for high-speed rail within the corridor.