The world shipping industry is risky involving high uncertainties, and maritime safety has a direct bearing on human life, property and health of the marine environment. Therefore, safety has always been the focus of maritime transportation. Total-loss marine accidents present the most serious accident type in terms of economic cost. It is therefore crucial for decision-making and guidance on rational safety resource allocation through the analysis and evaluation of the influential factors of total-loss marine accidents. Its novelty lies in the pioneering analysis of all the factors solely influencing total-loss accidents in the whole world region, hence aid the development of a big database on total-loss marine accidents for rational safety policy making. This paper involves 16 ship types and 13 main navigation sea regions and analyses the data on the total-loss marine accidents that occurred in the world from 1998 to 2018. As a result, 11 main influential factors are selected and evaluated by an improved entropy weight-TOPSIS model. The results show that, in the both models with respect to ship type and sea region, the main influential factors are foundering, stranding and fires/explosions. Based on such findings, this paper proposes a series of countermeasures with respect to different factors respectively, which will aid the relevant maritime safety authorities such as the International Maritime Organization and ship owners/operations to take effective risk control actions to avoid/reduce the occurrence of total-loss marine accidents in future.