ABSTRACT
Due to the intangible and heterogeneous nature of services, providing zero-defect service is almost impossible and therefore service failure is inevitable. The tourism industry is no exception, where interactions between service providers and customers happen in multiphases including pre-trip, during-trip, and post-trip stages with a number of different parties involved during the process. Given that service failures cannot be avoided, organizations in tourism industries need to manage potential service failure by implementing effective service recoveries. Accordingly, this chapter provides an extant review of the existing literature on service failure, customer responses to service failure and service recovery in relation to the travel and tourism industry. It then suggests strategies that organizations can utilize to manage customers’ dissatisfying service experiences and increase customer satisfaction.
