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The purpose of this paper is to focus on the aims of discovering the problems existing in the seafarer recruitment management system and of finding out an efficiency recruitment system for shipping companies to retain skillful seafarers continue serving in their companies.

This study interviewed with the senior managers of shipping companies to clarify the seafarers’ problems they have encountered and conducted questionnaire survey to collect the seafarers’ perceptions for further analysis. Exploratory factor analysis and multi-regression analysis were applied for the data analysis.

There were four primary dimensions relating to seafarers’ management, namely, work attitude, loyalty, payment and welfare and opportunity. The results revealed that dimensions of payment and welfare and opportunity were significantly positive effect on seafarers’ loyalty; only the dimension of payment and welfare was found to significantly effect on the work attitude. However, these four dimensions were all found a positive effect on the work performance as well.

The results of cross-section research cannot fit all economic fluctuation conditions.

The ship owners and the operators should consider both the environmental motivation and the hygiene factor to establish a proper seafarers’ recruitment management system to retain seafarers and lead to better performance of the seafarers. The study findings also suggest the shipping company should pay attention to hire local seafarers, i.e. seafarers from the place where the company is based, as those local seafarers might have more work commitment than seafarers from other countries.

The findings of the study show that welfare and opportunity is the most important factor on loyalty, while it also exerts significant effect on work attitude and work performance. The results suggest that the motivation and performance are not merely dependent upon environmental needs (payment). The findings provide evidences of the importance of non-monetary remuneration within the seafarers’ recruitment management system.

The objective of this research is to examine the performance of weather routing service in the North Pacific Ocean based on a global container shipping company.

The data comprise two passages: one that departs from the port of Taipei to the port of Los Angeles (TPE-LAX) and another that departs from the port of Tacoma to the port of Kaohsiung (TCM-KSG). A weather routing service was utilized to compare the differences of the distance, sailing time and fuel consumed among different voyages.

Results indicated that the average speed of vessel in winter is faster than in summer. The vessels consumed much more fuel in the winter than they did in the summer. In terms of the distance of the passage, the results show that the ships' sailing distance across the North Pacific Ocean in the summer was shorter than it was in the winter.

Due to the difficultly of practical data collection, relatively few sailing records were employed in this study. It is suggested that additional sailing records should be collected, which adopt weather routing recommendations, to more comprehensively analyze sailing performance in future research.

The study's findings offer valuable guidance to different stakeholders in the maritime industry (e.g. seafarers, marine hull and machinery companies, Protection and Indemnity Club (P&I), ocean container carriers and freight forwarders) to clarify their responsibilities in order to achieve desired sailing outcomes.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, the current study is the first research to utilize practical sailing data to provide objective evidence of sailing performance based on a weather routing service, which can assist various stakeholders to make optimal decisions.