Assessing Service Quality of Maritime Express

Ocean transport to international trade is very important in Taiwan. The direct shipping opened between Taiwan and China in 2008 and the rising of e-commerce business increases the volumes of cargoes between cross-strait. The communications between Taiwan and China have become more frequently. That is why the “maritime express” appeared. Comparison with air express, maritime express has an advantage in low cost. It uses high speed ship to reduce transit time significantly. For example, it only takes three hours to sail from Taipei port to Pingtan port. However, maritime express is still in early stages of development. The volumes of cargoes cannot meet the expectations, many supporting measures are not perfect, and the service quality needs to be improved. Therefore, this study investigates requirements of customers to provide some improvement strategies and improve the situation. This study lists the differences between air express and maritime express such as no. of operators, weight of limitation, freight, range of delivery, and other limitation. It provides SWOT analysis and review some related literature about service quality to be a basic of doing this research. Besides, this study combines AHP and quality function deployment which can consider the perspective from shippers to investigate the service quality of maritime express. We believe that using this method can transform customer requirements into technical requirements. Finally, this study can use the foresaid results to provide suggestions and conclusions. Hopefully it can make a reference for service providers to develop maritime express to attract more people to use this service and prosper this industry in the future. Keywords—Analytic hierarchy process, maritime express, quality function deployment, service quality.