Diss. Berlin : Technische Universität Berlin. Fakultät Verkehrs- und Maschinensysteme, 2007

Multimodal cooperation is a potentially attractive marketing activity for transport companies offering long-distance passenger service. This research presents results of a case study on an innovative multimodal transport service called Night&Flight implemented by the railway company CityNightLine and Swiss International Airlines. This product was oriented towards business travelers and enabled passengers to take a night train to their destination and a one-way flight on the return journey (or vice versa). By offering a single multimodal product, the Night&Flight program is a pioneer in the field of so-called soft alliances. On the theoretical level many customer advantages can be identified for the Night&Flight product compared to single-mode transport options including temporal flexibility, reliability, and classical soft transport choice factors (novelty, travel time usability, lifestyle). Travel research reveals that the transport mode choice process for business trips differs significantly from that for private journeys in the terms of the actor attributes (decision-making process, access to information), cost sensitivity and financing, however there is increasing pressure to reduce costs in the business travel market. This cost pressure has caused a change in the business travel reservation routine and has increased transparency in the market. Both these trends should, in principle, increase the potential for successfully implementing innovative offers like Night&Fly. In this research, Rogers’ modified innovation-decision model was used to examine to what extend the Night&Flight service offer was noticed by the target group and which of the service’s theoretical advantages were actually valued by customers. The project conducted separate surveys of Night&Flight customers and non-customers. These surveys revealed that night trains cannot acquire new customers by implementing the Night&Flight program; however, current night train-travelers could be enticed to use night trains more often with the Night&Flight program. In addition to the case study, the research presents several different multimodal combination models. The research finds that it will be necessary for transport operators to provide integrated multimodal products to attract business travelers, rather than expecting the customers to create multimodal trips on their own. One potential tool in developing these integrated products involves creating software, similar to airline reservation systems, that includes both airline and railway products. Only by integrating all rail passenger transport services into the system will it be possible to reach the critical mass needed to amortize the high cost of implementing such a system. When developing such a system for multimodal long distance transport, it is critical that the system provide a fair comparison between carrier-specific product characteristics (time, price).