Many railway companies employ "first-come-first-serve (FCFS)" concept in reservation system. The "first-come-first-serve" concept seems fair to passengers but not effective in overall passenger load and revenue management. For example, long distance passengers cannot purchase tickets because seats are not available in some intervals, during the wanted origin and destination (O-D), which are purchased earlier by short distance passengers. Moreover, those empty seats are waste of opportunity at the departure. To eliminate the bottleneck, it is proposed to use seat inventory control in high speed rail. Seat inventory control is a concept in revenue management,for example keeping some seats for long distance passengers who may come later, instead of selling to earlier short haul O-D passenger. The networkcan earn higher revenue and improve serviceability (in passenger-km) and overall passenger load by maximizing the utility of existing facilities. Even though seat allocation control seems to be beneficial to Railway Company, the company concern about the loss of passengers' goodwill to the company because seat allocation control reject some passengers to accept otherpassengers in order to increase overall revenue. The objective of this study is to prove that seat allocation can improve not only overall revenue but also improve passenger load and rejection request. Finally, it is shown that the overall passenger goodwill, or customer satisfaction, does not decrease if seat allocation control is employed. For the covering abstractsee ITRD E135582.
Abstract