5. Discussions and conclusions
The increasing air travel demand in Southeast Asia has driven the growth of LCCs in the region. Thailand and Philippines areconsidered key markets for the LCC segment (Teng and Perry, 2013). Thailand is a very friendly market for LCCs with a growing travel demand from the middle class, whereas other transportation options are very limited for the populated urban areas (Bland, 2014). While price seems to be an obvious reason for passengers to select LCCs, this is not the only factor influencing LCC passengers' buying decision. To gain a big and full picture of how LCC passengers in Southeast Asia intend and decide to choose LCCs as their transportation choice, it is also important to examine how their attitudes and behaviors toward LCCs drive their buying behavior. There is a relative lack of successful explanation of the choice of LCCs in this region from the existing literature with only a few studies addressing topics like passenger satisfaction and perceptions of service quality; but these studies found inconsistent and contradicting findings regarding the impacts of these factors. This paper aimed at filling these gaps in the literature by examining attitude and behavioral factors and their effects on LCC passengers’ buying intention and behavior. The research model was built based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) and a large-scale survey was collected in two major airports in Thailand to test the model.
