How Much Are People Willing to Pay for Medical Drone Deliveries?

With the ImAFUSA Project concluding on 28/2/2026, the following post was written by the ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon to provide an overview of their work and results in the project. See also: Understanding Transport Affordability: A Key to Equitable Mobility.

At ImAFUSA, we recently conducted a study to understand how much people are willing to pay for faster medical delivery services using drones and what drives those preferences beyond cost and time alone.

We ran an online stated preference survey, where participants were presented with hypothetical medical delivery scenarios and asked to choose between different options. These scenarios varied in delivery fee, delivery time, and delivery mode, comparing drone deliveries with traditional ground vehicles.

Figure 1: How does WTP change depending on delivery context?

Our analysis covered two samples: a full medical sample of 510 respondents from 24 Schengen countries (with 75% residing in or originally from Portugal), and a Portugal-only subsample of 380 respondents.

To capture how perceptions and attitudes shape choices, we used an Integrated Choice and Latent Variable (ICLV) model. This hybrid modelling approach allows unobservable factors (such as social acceptability of drones and attitudes toward medical use cases) to directly influence delivery choices, resulting in more behaviourally realistic estimates of willingness to pay.

Figure 2: Online stated-preference survey. Stated choice experiment (for both medical and non-medical scenarios)

Participants show a substantially higher willingness to pay for time savings when medical deliveries are made by drones, with values of €18.6 per hour in the full sample and €24.8 per hour in the Portuguese sample. Conversely, willingness to pay for faster ground delivery is minimal, ranging from €0.12 to €0.36 per hour.

Figure 3: Results of survey

These findings highlight a key insight for decision-makers: ignoring behavioural and attitudinal factors can significantly underestimate the true market potential of medical drone delivery services.