INTRODUCTION
Freight transportation selection is of critical importance to the shippers in terms of achieving high customer service level, cost savings and efficiency in the overall supply chain. On the other hand, providers of freight transportation services have been interested in finding out the salient freight transport selection factors of shippers in order to be competitive within freight transport market. Such an attempt would help the freight transport providers to design their marketing mixes effectively. These facts have directed the attention of transport and logistics researchers towards the issue of freight transportation selection since the beginning of 1970, and as a result of this, many empirical researches and reviews have been realized.
Liner transport services can be regarded as the “possession processing” services in which there is no real need for the customers to enter the service factory and accompany their possession while it is being processed (Lovelock, 1996) whereas, a “medium-contact” occurs between the shipper and liner transport during the service delivery. Liner shipping companies serve the organizational markets, and not a customer but a buying centre plays an important role in the performance evaluation (Tuna, 2001). Considering this fact, measurement of liner transport selection criteria is relatively different compared with the consumer markets.
When such evidences as Turkey’s land bridge position both in East-West and South-North axes, economic developments in CIS, Central Asia and Caucasian, productivity increase in Turkey in parallel with Southeastern Anatolia Project (GAP) and acceleration in the relations with the EU are considered, Turkey has a great potential within the freight transport and logistics activities. The volume of the logistics market in Turkey was estimated to be 1, 5 billion USD in 2000 according to the managers of the leading logistics companies (Ozer and Tuna 2002). Although the importance of freight transport and logistics services has been increasing among companies in Turkey due to the accelerating international trade, the number of the comprehensive studies within the freight transportation selection is negligible. This paper attempts to investigate the liner transportation selection criteria of Turkish Shippers.