Satisfaction with Public Transport Trips

2.6. Aggregation of multi-modal door-to-door trips 
A trip can be defined as a continuous sequence of legs from an origin to a destination and with a single 
main purpose (Axhausen, 2007). A trip leg is a continuous movement with one mode of transport which 
includes any waiting times immediately before or during that movement. Waiting times include any 
transferring times. Thus, multi-modal door-to-door trips have an origin and a destination, consist of two 
or more trip legs of which one is identified as the main trip leg, and at least one as access or egress. 
Several authors indicated that all trip legs, as part of a multi-episodic experience, are believed to 
contribute to the overall trip experience (e.g. Susilo and Cats, 2014; Ettema et al., 2016). Almost all 
previous studies investigated the aggregation of retrospective multi-episodic experiences in a domain 
different than transport (e.g. Miron-Shatz, 2009). In general, their results showed that heuristic rules 
(peak, peak-and-end, serial position) are superior in explaining the aggregation of experiences than 
normative rules (equal average, moving duration weighted, complex duration weighted). The only 
investigation in the transport field found that the overall trip satisfaction of commuters can be modeled as 
a weighted average of the satisfaction with individual legs, where legs are weighted by their respective 
duration (Suzuki et al., 2014). However, further investigation is needed to determine whether this holds 
and applies to different trips configurations. 
2.7. Thesis’s conceptual model 
A number of conceptual relations and empirical findings found in the literature review are used to 
construct this thesis’ conceptual model. The theoretical models presented in section 2.1 do not consider 
some other relevant aspects that influence the travel experience and travel satisfaction. Considering the 
quality of service model (Parasuraman et al., 1985) displayed in section 2.1 this thesis deals with Gap 5, 
and thus the gap between expected and perceived service quality.
Traveler needs might be a function of the quality of the PT service, traveler characteristics (e.g. gender, 
age, education level or income), the travel mode used, the trip purpose or the frequency with which one 
travel by PT (familiarity). It is also hypothesized that environmental factors, such as the built-
environment, weather conditions and objective accessibility and proximity measures, that the traveler 
experience in the first mile of the trip, may impact travelers service perceptions. Therefore, all these 
aspects, together with some other are investigated in this thesis. 

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