Inland navigation water routes within Europe are more than 37,000 kilometers long. That fact stands in contrast to rail freight traffic high capacity reserves and the share of inland waterway transportation, which amounts to just 6% of the total inland transport burden within the European Union. In light of an increasing cross-border freight traffic demand and its resulting congestion and environmental issues - a modal shift towards inter-modal transport offers an interesting opportunity to counteract that development. Despite that, inter-modal waterway transportation is often seen as an unattractively priced transportation alternative, as increased settlement costs express themselves in higher end prices. Consequently, price is a key decision factor for favoring a mode of transportation. For this reason my aim is, through study of the pricing system, to analyze in what ways the price system could be arranged in order to enhance the attractiveness of inter-modal inland waterway transportation as well as to remain competitive on the long term. Due to the service nature of inter-modal transportation there are especially dynamic differential pricing systems to be particularly suited, which take the customer's needs into account and determine differential prices based on order time and execution of service time. The result is a pricing system that ensures, besides consideration of the demand, cost-recovery and increased attractiveness for inland waterway services. In summary it appears that the implementation of an appropriate pricing system can have far reaching benefits and therefore should be given a high priority in practice.(author's abstract) / Series: Schriftenreihe des Instituts für Transportwirtschaft und Logistik - Verkehr

Master-Arbeit Univ. St. Gallen, 2007.