Page 417 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 5

A first evaluation of the relationship between High Speed Rail (HSR) and the tourism sector in Turkey: The cases of
two Turkish cities

In a customer satisfaction survey conducted in 2016 by TSR reaching 1455 passengers travelling
along HSR corridors, it was observed that 35% of the participants travelled 2-5 times, 18% of
them travelled 6-10 times, 12% travelled 11-20 times and %17 of them travelled more than 21
times in one year (TSR, 2017b).

On ANK-ESK HSR line, 29% of the passengers travelled more than 21 times in a year while
14% travelled 11-20 times. Similarly, for ANK-KON HSR line, 22% of the passengers travelled
more than 21 times and 14% travelled 11-20 times in a year. This suggests frequent use of
HSR for regular activities.

When the purpose of the realized HSR trips were examined, it was revealed that 57% of the
participants had tourism purposes (vacation, family/friend visit), while 20% of them had
business purposes. Education trips (for students or lecturers, etc.) consisted only 7% among
other trip purposes. For ANK-ESK and ANK-KON lines, almost 50% of the trips had tourism
purposes (vacation, family/friend visit).

The most important factor behind the HSR preference was stated by the participants as
the “short travel time”, followed by “being fast”, safety and punctuality. However, about
half of the participants stated that appropriate schedule of trains and comfort was also
important in their choice.

The general satisfaction of participants from the HSR services was determined as 87%
(TSR, 2017b). In another study on travel characteristics of HSR users (Celikkol-Kocak et al.,
2017) conducted as HSR main stations, a significant amount of first-time HSR users (23.3%
of the 412 participants) were interpreted as HSR is still in a growing stage and its current
pricing level encourages people to experience it. Also, it was stated that more than 40% of
the participants had business or tourism trip purposes

3.2 Service characteristics of the transportation modes along HSR
corridors

As the modal attributes are necessary to develop mode choice models, travel time
and cost information of the HSR, bus and air alternatives were compiled from
National Transportation Portal (NTP) for each HSR corridors as shown in Table 4
(NTP, 2016).

The weekly service frequencies for all three modes were gathered to give an idea about
the size of the intercity passenger sector for these corridors. (Service is defined as the
number of round-trips for a given corridor). ANK-ESK was the most frequently served HSR
line with 77 services in a week.

Second highest service frequency was observed on ESK-IST line with 56 services a
week. KON-ESK and KON-IST are the least served HSR lines with only 14 services a
week (corresponding to 2 round- trips a day). These service frequencies are highly
correlated with the annual ridership values of HSR lines, but it is not possible to
comment on the causality of the relation, as whether low service frequencies cause
low ridership, or viceversa.

International Congress on High-speed Rail: Technologies and Long Term Impacts - Ciudad Real (Spain) - 25th anniversary Madrid-Sevilla corridor 415