Due to the rapid changes in world trade and shipping environment, today's ports face ever-increasing competition, from adjacent competing ports. To this reason, port service quality has been recognized as an important strategy to take competitive advantage for those competition. In general, service quality has effect on customer loyalty, and customer loyalty is the resource to sustain competitive advantage which service providers or service producers. By improving customer loyalty, companies can get more benefits and added value. However, this causality qf port service quality has not been clearly identified. Thus, various empirical studies in relation to port service quality are needed. The aim of this study is to analyze the effect of perceived port service quality on customer satisfaction and loyalty. To achieve this aim, we established 8 hypotheses based on SERVPERF in order to test correlations of 5 dimensions of port service, port service quality, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty. From the result of the hypothesis testing, we found that customer satisfaction and port service quality do not affect customer loyalty in spite of high effect of port service on customer satisfaction.

• Jae-Gon Chang
• Hong-Girl Lee
• Cheol-Yeong Lee