Research Purpose: The central purpose of this research project is to identify servicernQuality gaps, assess overall service quality of transportation service provided byrnEthiopian shipping lines and level of satisfaction in views of customers and finally tornExplore the causal relationship among service quality dimensions and overall servicernquality and satisfaction.rnResearch Methodology: The seven modified dimensions of SERVQUAL namely,rnTangibles, reliability, assurance, empathy, service coverage andrnSchedule, and process (which consists of items totaling 27) was used to measurernCustomers' perceptions and expectations of the quality of maritime transport service on arn7-poinl liker type scale representing ", strong disagreement" and 7 representingrn"Strong agreement ", the entire research was conducted using primary data directlyrnElicited from, the modified SERVQUAL model instrument adapted to fit inrnThe context of the study were distributed to 35 companies engaged in import businessrnActivities and 32 complete and, usable questionnaire were collected for further' analysis rnWith collection rate of 91.4%rn/rnFindings: Reliability anal was done to assess the internal consistency of the salernAnd it resulted in overall reliability he gap coefficient (chronbatch alpha )of 0.943.regardingrnThe service quality gaps identified the highest quality gap was observed in the processrnAspect (-4.09), for owed by service coverage and schedule (-3.42), reliability (-3,02),rnEmpathy (-283), responsiveness (-2.79), tangibles (-2.64), and the least was absorbed inrnThe assurance dimension with gap scares of -2.60. The other investigation areas of this rnResearch is determining the causal relationship among modified SERVQUAL dimensions,rnOverall service quality and level of satisfaction and ultimately developa regressionrnmodel. Two regression models were found for overall service quality. The first model inrnWhich assurance was considered as a single statistically significant predictor, explainsrn31.1%of the variations in overall service quality.rnIn the second model both assurance and reliability were considered together as rnSignificant predictors. Explains 52.4% of the variation in overall service quality.rnSimilarly, the study also found two models for overall customer satisfaction. The firstrnModel where reliability was considered the only statistically significant, explains 34.3%rnOf the variation in the overall level of customer satisfaction where as in the second modelrnBoth reliability and assurance were considered and it explains 42.8% of the variation inrnThe level customer sat is/action.rnManagerial implications: Because the service quality scores for all the modifiedrnSERVQUAL dimensions were found to be negative and very high which calls maximumrneffort from the company to at least narrow down these wider gaps. Furthermore, thernFact that both Reliability and Assurance dimensions are strong predictors of bothrnOverall service quality and satisfaction necessitates emphasis to be given to these qualityrnDimensions if the company is to enhance the dependent variables