Survey design for exploring demand for Mobility as a Service plans

As the Mobility as a Service (MaaS) concept attracts more interest, there is increased demand for understanding more about MaaS subscription plans. There is a gap in knowledge on how the plans should be created and what transport modes and features they should include in order to cater for the heterogeneous mobility preferences of all the socio-demographic user groups. This paper presents the design of a survey including a stated preference (SP) experiment that captures the complex decision-making process of purchasing MaaS products. Respondents are presented with repeated choices between four hypothetical MaaS plans out of which three are fixed plans and one is a menu option. This approach allows for testing people's preferences and willingness to pay for flexibility. The attributes of the plans include transport modes and amounts, mode specific features (e.g. 10-min taxi guarantee), transferability (meaning how much of left over mode-attributes can be transferred to the next month), special bonuses (e.g. a free dinner for two) and the price of the plan. The SP is tested with a number of focus groups. Insights on two data collection applications are detailed, first as part of web-based survey, then incorporated into a smartphone-based prompted recall travel survey. The design presented in this paper can be adapted to other areas and provide valuable insights for MaaS products design and pricing.