Abstract
Service failure is inevitable. Although empirical studies on the outcomes and processes of service failures have been conducted in the hotel industry, the findings need more exploration to understand how different segments perceive service failures and the associated emotions differently. This approach enables hotel managers to develop more effective strategies to prevent service failures and implement more specific service-recovery actions. For analysis, we obtained a nine-year (2010–2018) longitudinal dataset containing 1224 valid respondents with 73,622 words of textual content from a property affiliated with an international hotel brand in Canada. A series of text-mining and natural language processing (NLP) analyses, including frequency analysis and word cloud, sentiment analysis, word correlation, and TF–IDF analysis, were conducted to explore the information hidden in the massive amount of unstructured text data. The results revealed the similarities and differences between groups (i.e., men vs. women and leisure vs. business) in reporting service failures. We also carefully examined different meanings of words that emerged from the text-mining results to ensure a more comprehensive understanding of the guest experience.
Highlights
This study aims to identify critical issues related to service failures and explore similarities and differences between groups when reporting service failures in the hotel industry based on a longitudinal dataset via a text-mining approach
Despite efforts to understand diverse types of incidents in the customer’s journey, service-failure experiences among diverse groups remain underexplored in the hotel industry
By text-mining 1224 actual hotel reviews (73,622 words of textual content), this study examined guests’ service-failure experiences during their stays at a branded hotel
Summary
The development of global competition requires effective approaches to reduce failures and attain error-free processes in service industries [1]. Errors are inevitable in the service industry [2]. Service in the hospitality industry involves multiple interactions between the service providers and customers, and a high risk of service failures accompanies these interactions. Service providers must act to effectively offset customers’ adverse reactions to prevent post-consumption customer dissatisfaction [3,4], passive recommendation behavior [5], increased switching [6], and decreased revenue [7]. An appropriate service-recovery mechanism allows service providers to alleviate these potentially adverse consequences and restore customers’ positive attitudes and confidence. Studies conclusively show that even with excellent service recovery, restoring customer satisfaction is not as promising as preventing service failure in the first place [8]
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