Service failures and recovery in hospitality and tourism: a review of literature and recommendations for future research

Service failures and recoveries have important implications for hospitality and tourism businesses, not only due to general service characteristics of inseparability, heterogeneity and perishability, but also due to the interactions between service employees and customers. This review paper shows that the study of service failures and recovery in hospitality and tourism has been largely limited to the studies of customer satisfaction, service quality, culture, justice, empowerment and attribution. This review of studies suggests that the field of service failures and recovery would gain additional momentum by combining these studies with organisational theories and concepts (e.g., organisational citizenship, transaction analysis, emotional labour, emotional intelligence, stress, burnout syndrome).