Analyzing the correlation between commuting satisfaction and travelling utility

The interest for travel satisfaction has rapidly grown during the past two decades. Since the development of Discrete Choice Theory, doing a trip was mostly described as a pure derived activity without utility per se but nowadays many scholars have demonstrated that individuals might be satisfied in performing the trip itself. However, little is still known on the relation between the travelling utility and the stated satisfaction for a specific trip. The objective of this paper is to analyse the relation between the stated commuting satisfaction and the utility of the associated trip thanks to the Logsum function, which is often used to represent the aggregated utility of a set of travel alternatives. The results of a travel survey implemented at the University of Luxembourg in 2012, show that the utility function, expressed through its Logsum, is positively correlated with the stated commuting satisfaction. While the Logsum function of the travelling utility might, to some extent, approximate the travelling satisfaction, some variations in the correlation magnitude, due to context particularities and socio-demographic attributes, are observed and discussed in this study.