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Wine tourism has emerged as a growing area of special interest tourism in Australia, and is an increasingly significant component of the regional and rural tourism product of Western Australia. The increased significance and growing competitiveness of this sector has led to a heightened concern by producers and consumers for the quality of services being offered, and has forced many within the industry to invest in the delivery of higher levels of service quality as a means to achieving competitive differentiation. An integral part of any organisation’s attempt to deliver on this front is a commitment to a process of continuous quality improvement. This requires a systematic approach to quality measurement. Investigates the conceptualisation and measurement of service quality and its importance to the wine tourism industry and reports the findings from a recently‐conducted survey of cellar door customers at four Western Australian wineries. Demonstrates the relative usefulness of the importance/performance methodology for cellar door operators in highlighting how wineries are performing from a customer point of view, and also what is important in terms of performance from the customers’ point of view.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the importance of cellar door sales in wineries and test a method of assessing service quality using the services mapping approach, for the purposes of enhancing research in this important area.

Service mapping involved a group of students in using participant observation techniques to map service quality at three stages of the winery visit: approach and entry; the cellar door; departure and other observations. Observers were instructed to use all five senses in making their observations, i.e. the look, smell, sound, taste and feel of the experience. Physical evidence and staff interactions were also recorded and invisible management processes were implied.

Each of the three wineries studied provided a distinct theme and presentation, sensorial experience and level of service quality based on the observations. The technique of service mapping could provide winery and cellar door managers with unique insights into the totality of the cellar door visitor experience.

Research on cellar door service quality has implications for the presentation of the wine brand and corresponding brand awareness, loyalty and sales. This research method has utility in assessing the cellar door experience and associated cellar door and winery management processes.

This is the first time that service mapping has been used to assess the cellar door experience. It has provided some new and useful insights for researchers and managers in the wine industry.

The purpose of this study is truck scheduling and assignment of trucks to the doors simultaneously since these issues were considered mainly separately in the previous research. Also, the door service time and its impact on truck scheduling were not taken into account, so this research endeavors to cover this gap.

In this research, a novel model has been presented for simultaneous truck scheduling and assignment problem with time window constraints for the arrival and departure of trucks, mixed service mode dock doors and truck queuing. To resolve the developed model, two meta-heuristic algorithms, namely, genetic and imperialist competitive algorithms, are presented.

The computational results indicate that the proposed framework leads to increased total costs, although it has a more accurate planning; moreover, these indicate that the proposed algorithms have different performances based on the criteria considered for the comparison.

There are some limitations in this research, which can be considered by other researchers to expand the current study, among them the specifications of uncertainty about arrival times of inbound and outbound trucks, number of merchandises which has been loaded on inbound trucks are the main factors. If so, by considering this situation, a realistic scheme about planning of cross docking system would be acquired. Moreover, the capacity of temporary storage has been considered unlimited, so relaxing this limitation can prepare a real and suitable situation for further study. Examining the capacity in the front of each type of doors of cross-dock and executive servers are the other aspects, which could be expanded in the future.

In this study, a mathematical programing model proposed for truck scheduling to minimize total costs including holding, truck tardiness and waiting time for queue of trucks caused by the interference of each carrier’s movement. At the operational levels, this research considered a multi-door cross-docking problem with mixed service mode dock doors and time window constraints for arrival and departure time of trucks. Moreover, M/G/C queue system was developed for truck arrival and servicing of carriers to trucks.

Facing the diverse needs of large-scale customers, based on available railway service resources and service capabilities, this paper aims to research the design method of railway freight service portfolio, select optimal service solutions and provide customers with comprehensive and customized freight services.

Based on the characteristics of railway freight services throughout the entire process, the service system is decomposed into independent units of service functions, and a railway freight service combination model is constructed with the goal of minimizing response time, service cost and service time. A model solving algorithm based on adaptive genetic algorithm is proposed.

Using the computational model, an empirical analysis was conducted on the entire process freight service plan for starch sold from Xi'an to Chengdu as an example. The results showed that the proposed optimization model and algorithm can effectively guide the design of freight plans and provide technical support for real-time response to customers' diversified entire process freight service needs.

With the continuous optimization and upgrading of railway freight source structure, customer demands are becoming increasingly diverse and personalized. Studying and designing a reasonable railway freight service plan throughout the entire process is of great significance for timely response to customer needs, improving service efficiency and reducing design costs.

An increasing literature focuses on how Demand Responsive Transport (DRT) may contribute to improve public transport. However, qualitative studies about whether such services contribute to social inclusion are lacking. The aim is therefore to understand how citizens experience DRT services.

For this purpose, we compare the different local public transport solutions in three rural municipalities in Norway. One case represents a conventional public transport service with a school bus that is open for all. The two other cases represent DRT solutions with different characteristics in terms of how extensive the services are. The data are qualitative, gathered via interviews and focus groups.

We find that who the users are and their patterns of use differ between the cases. The more extensive the service is, the more popular it is – even to the extent that leisure clubs adapt their start and end times to the public transport routes. Moreover, the evidence suggests that door-to-door transport is crucial for the ability of many people of older age to travel.

The need for door-to-door services means that flexibility has to be incorporated into DRT schemes with fixed bus stops, if the aim is to cover all citizens.

The insights about how not only the users themselves experience different transport services, but also their relations, provide added value. Finally, we argue that, given among others the dispersion of transport responsibilities on different political levels and sectors, the DRT services have not been successful in solving efficiency issues.

This chapter provides an overview of waste management across Europe. It offers an outlook of evolution of waste generation and how European Union (EU) countries treat waste, by providing historical and current data as well as by describing a few best practices of waste management companies and municipalities throughout Europe. The circular economy framework applied to urban waste management and the zero waste strategy are described.

There are large differences in both speed and costs between the traffic modes road and air. Rail has not yet successfully offered services “faster than road but cheaper than air”, although there are technical, logistical and economical opportunities for competing with air for intra‐continental shipments and co‐operate for intercontinental ones. The article categorises segments of the European express freight market and analyses them in a rail perspective. Services between Sweden and Continental Europe and domestically in Sweden are focused. System modelling tools are also adapted to the application of express intermodal transport and prospective roles for rail in express transport are defined. The analysis shows that a transport chain with many actors and long distances does not necessarily entail longer transport times than a short‐distance with the same circumstances under a single management. The analysis also shows that many express transport systems are built in a modular way, implying that subsystems can be exchanged.

The attributes of services can be categorised as service quality and service preference. While studies have addressed the importance of service quality, shippers’ service preference and its relationship to perceived value and purchase intentions remain unexplored. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to propose a causal model in the context of short sea shipping services to investigate the influence of purchase intention through the shipper’s service preference and perceived value.

Structural equation modelling is applied to assess the empirical strength of the relationships in the proposed model. The model is validated through empirical testing by taking samples from shippers in Taiwan.

The results show that service attributes, namely, timing related, pricing related, warehousing, sales, door-to-door, information and advertising, positively affect shippers’ service preference. Service preference significantly affects customer perceived value as well as purchase intentions. Moreover, perceived value strongly affects purchase intentions.

Matching between the product offered and the diversified customer need is key to the business operation’s success. This study suggests that carriers should position themselves to both self-competence and market values.

This study aims to identify the determinants of transport mode choice and the constraints on shifting freight in New Zealand (NZ) from road to rail and/or coastal shipping, and to quantify the trade-off between factors affecting shippers’ perceptions, to assist in increasing the share of freight moved by non-road transport modes.

A revealed preference survey of 183 freight shippers, including small and medium enterprises and freight agents in NZ, is used to investigate whether freight shippers’ characteristics affect their ranked preference for attributes related to mode choice and modal shift. Additionally, a rank-ordered logistic (ROL) model is estimated using the ranking data.

The results reveal several distinct types of transport mode choice behaviour within the sample and show how the preferences for timeliness, cost, accessibility, damage and loss, customer service, and suitability vary between industry groups and business types. Also, the ROL method allows us to identify heterogeneity in preferences for mode choice and mode shift factors for freight within NZ.

The results imply that NZ shippers ranked transport time as the most significant constraint upon distributing goods by rail, while accessibility and load size were the most significant constraints upon using coastal shipping. The study also identifies how NZ shippers’ modal shift constraints vary according to the firm’s individual or logistical characteristics.

This study informs freight transport policy makers about the needs of NZ shippers by providing quantitative measures of the intensity of preference for the various mode choice factors.

Those involved in freight transport have a better basis for formulating transport policy.

In recent years, the business of container lines has faced severe challenges such as overcapacity and low profitability. To survive in such a competitive market, container lines need to maintain long-term customer relationships by enhancing the satisfaction and loyalty of customers. The purpose of this paper is to adopt a social exchange theory (SET) approach and investigate the impact of relational bonding strategies on the satisfaction and loyalty of customers in container shipping.

Drawing on SET, a theoretical model that specifies the relationships between relational bonding strategies, customer satisfaction and loyalty was proposed. Survey data were collected from 175 freight forwarders. The obtained data were analyzed using structural equation modelling.

The results indicate that financial bonding strategies have the most significant direct effects on customer satisfaction, while social bonding strategies have the strongest direct impact on customer loyalty. Financial bonding strategies, on the other hand, have the strongest total effects on customer loyalty. Intermodal and basic operations are found to have the equal total effects on customer loyalty.

By identifying the most effective relational bonding strategies for enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty, this study’s findings allow container lines to better allocate their resources and implement effective relational marketing policies to satisfy and retain their customers.

This research analyses and validates the determinants of customer satisfaction and loyalty from a relational lens and empirically contributes to the field of relational marketing in the container shipping industry.