An empirical thesis of service recovery in the package holiday industry

Abstract: Purpose: The aim of this thesis is to gain an understanding what it is within the vacation offering that makes certain customers dissatisfied with a service recovery effort. Design/methodology/approach: The basis of the thesis is a qualitative approach since we want to gain an understanding about what it is in the service failure and service recovery that make customers dissatisfied. Although, a quantitative approach will be used as a supplement to the qualitative approach in order to seek patterns that we can interpret. By combining these approaches, it should enable us to gain an understanding about the customer’s dissatisfaction. Findings: The study found that the package holiday organizations seem to handle the service recovery process well. Therefore, we propose that when a negative emotion occurs, the customer’s glorification of the offerings benefits get destroyed, creating their dissatisfaction. This makes it hard for the organization to perform a successful service recovery no matter the severity of the service failure since the hedonic values the customer was seeking becomes lost. Furthermore, the customers create expectations when seeking hedonic values, which make it difficult for the organizations to perform their initial offering successfully. We also emphasize the need of an expansion of the service recovery framework. There is a need of a shift from the organizations efforts to the customers experience within the service recovery process. Research limitations/implications for future research: This thesis emphasizes the need for further research concerning how organizations can perform a successful service recovery when hedonic values are a part of the offering. Hence, the focus in future research could be to develop methods for performing service recovery when hedonic values are in play. Furthermore, this thesis could only give propositions about what is causing the customers dissatisfaction, but could not find any core happenings causing the customers dissatisfaction. Therefore, future research could focus to gain a deeper understanding about what source that has caused the customers dissatisfaction. Furthermore, other dimensions surrounding the customers experience needs to be taken into consideration in future research. Practical implications: When hedonic values are in play, the customer’s expectations for the product or service becomes high. Therefore, 6 organizations face a lot more pressure when providing their service or, if a failure has occurred, service recovery. Keywords: service failure, service Recovery, justice dimension, hedonic values, satisfaction