ABSTRACT
Complaint management is an essential element of hotel business success. Handling customer complaints effectively could result in a future referral or loyalty behavior. Therefore, understanding the customer’s complaint behavior will help the hotel operator to create a strategy for maintaining their customers. This paper divides guest’s complaint behavior into four categories. They are voice responses, private responses that consist of negative word-of-mouth and exit, third party responses, and taking no action (inertia). These behaviors are related to Hofstede’s culture dimension that consists of six dimensions. The authors examined complaint behavior of Indonesian and non-Indonesian, in this case, Asian and Western, and evaluated the significant differences between those three groups of guests. Five-scale Likert questionnaires were distributed to 100 Indonesian, 75 Asian, and 75 Western guests. Then the data was analyzed using One-Way ANOVA. The findings showed that Indonesian and Western guests tend to have voice response complaint behavior, meaning they complained directly to the hotel. Whereas Asian guests were more likely to have negative word-of-mouth behavior, where they will share their bad experience to family and friends. In addition, there is a significant difference for voice, word-of-mouth, and inertia, while there is no significant difference for exit and third-party complaint behavior. The difference in voice responses behavior could be seen in Indonesian and Asian customers, while the difference in word-of-mouth and inertia behaviors were shown between Indonesian and Asian, also Asian and Western groups of customers. This study provides new insight about cross-culture complaint behavior.
