Abstract
Vietnam is a popular production base for multi-national companies and has become a hub for the global supply chain. Accordingly, to facilitate the increased demands on transportation and to satisfy customers’ complicated requirements, more attention has been paid to the service quality of container terminals. Thus, the aim of this paper is to investigate the service quality of transshipment container terminals in Vietnam from the perspective of shipping companies. The Consistent Fuzzy Preference Relation (CFPR) method has been introduced to solve multi-criteria service quality problems using both empirical data and expert knowledge. The results of this study illustrate that terminal accessibility and the proximity to a main trunk route are most important among the principal factors and sub-factors. Additionally, the TCIT terminal’s service quality ranks first among the top five container terminals in Vietnam. This study provides stakeholders with insight into competitive factors and risk factors for container terminals and their overall quality of service.
Highlights
Along with the development of global trade, liner container shipping is experiencing significant growth [1]
The service quality of the top five container terminals in Vietnam were evaluated based on 16 sub-factors, including seven quantitative factors and nine qualitative factors
The analysis examined the uncertainty of output as effected by the uncertainty of input [47,48], resulting in reliable results for the multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) problems [49]
Summary
Along with the development of global trade, liner container shipping is experiencing significant growth [1]. Fierce competition in the shipping industry has forced container shipping companies to improve their service quality at minimal cost [2]. The hub-and-spoke system can benefit from reduced haul lengths resulting in a lower carbon footprint, reduced cost by economies of scale, and increased service provision. Choosing a hub or transshipment container terminal (TCT) has become increasingly important to shipping companies [5], which are affected by many factors. Of those factors, service quality has been emphasized as one of the primary determinants of a terminal’s competitiveness [6,7], especially for trunk routes [8,9]. Service quality measurement is required in order to simultaneously consider quantitative and qualitative variables
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