Pricing for Railway Group Tickets in Revenue Management Increasing Revenue and Attracting New Users

The purpose of launching railway group tickets for railway enterprises is twofold: (1) increase revenue; (2) attract new users to travel by railway. In order to study how to achieve the above goals through price strategies for group tickets, this paper proposes an optimization approach for railway group ticket pricing in a scenario of multitrains. First, based on the consistent preference of passengers for group tickets, we model the decision‐making process of existing passengers purchasing group tickets and calculate the required quantitative boundary of existing passengers for selling out group tickets in order of priority. Then, under the constraints of stochastic demand and shared seat quota between group tickets and individual tickets, a multiobjective nonlinear optimization model with the objectives of maximizing both total expected revenue and expected sales of new users is constructed and solved. The analysis results reveal that there is no unique optimal solution simultaneously maximizing the two objectives. Increasing expected revenue will sacrifice the goal of attracting more incremental passengers to take trains. Limited by the fixed seat allocation, a scientific moderate discount scheme on group tickets can increase the total expected revenue. At this time, selling both group tickets and individual tickets yields higher revenue than only selling individual tickets, thus verifying the rationality of the mixed sales strategy of group tickets and individual tickets. Furthermore, we find an indicator named “elasticity of existing passengers” that has a critical impact on the expected revenue. Railway enterprises should take measures to incentivize the marketing enthusiasm of third‐party sales agencies to minimize the elasticity of existing passengers to achieve greater revenue.