Marina is a small port located along a coastline that provides facilities and services for small boats and yachts. The main facilities of marina are pontoon, freshwater, and power supplies. Marina also provides service for boat maintenance and service, and security. In Malaysia, the marina is operated by private companies and Marine Department Malaysia. All the marinas in Malaysia provide the same facilities and services, however they are not operating at the same level. Few marinas had closed their operation due to insufficient number of boats arrived to their marina. The reason of this issue is lack of study about marina operation and management in Malaysia. Further study should be done in this field to overcome this issue and increased the growth of economy for marina. Therefore, the objective of this study to determine the factors to establish a marina in Malaysia and to identify the reason certain marina less performed. This research focused on the marina operators on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. The literature review was used to identify the factors to establish a marina. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) approach was used to analyse the data. This method had ranked the crucial factors from the highest to the lowest percentage. Four main criteria to establish a marina had been identified, namely locations, facilities, services, and promotion. Besides that, there also the sub-criteria for all the main factor to describe it. All the identified factors had been analysed to find the most important factor. The consolidate result showed that geography, security, berthing, purpose, boat chandlery and boat service are the highest percentage among other factors. It concludes that it is the most important factor to establish a marina. These results can be used to improve the operation of marina in Malaysia by focusing on these aforementioned factors.

Recently, the migration of refugees has been drastically increasing and became a global issue which indirectly affects the shipmasters, authorities and shipowners during rescue operations. The objective of this paper is to study the challenges or difficulties in rescuing refugees at sea from the perspectives of shipmasters, authorities and shipowners in Malaysia. In this study, the key challenges faced by these three groups of individuals are collected and classified based on the primary data reviewed. The interview sessions were conducted with selected expertise and the data collected are analyzed based on the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) or precisely the pair-wise comparison methods. Through the calculations, the challenges are ranked from the most important challenges to the least important challenges. Furthermore, the data is analyzed by using expert judgments focusing on the relatively most important challenges faced by the three groups of individuals. Finally, the most important challenge faced by shipmasters is the safety of ships and crews, while for authorities, the most important challenge faced is delays in the initiation of rescue operations. For ship-owners, the most important challenge faced is time sensitive cargo loss. Ultimately, two suggestions have been proposed to encounter the most important challenge faced by these groups.