Tourist Satisfaction and Complaining Behavior: Measurement and Management Issues in the Tourism and Hospitality Industry

Effective Management of customer satisfaction and complaints is essential for organisations in terms of profitability and sustainability. This book details this subject. Organisations, successful in delivering a high level of customer satisfaction, tend to reap the benefits in the form of repeat patronage among existing customer and recruitment of new customers. Empirical and anecdotal evidence suggest that negligence of customer dissatisfaction and inevitable customer complaints might be costly. Research has shown that an unhappy customer will tell on average 9 other people about an unsatisfying experience. Ineffective handling of complaints increases frustration and dissatisfaction, reinforces negative consumer reactions and harms a company's reputation. Management of customer satisfaction particularly in service failure situations hinges largely on an understanding of the formation of satisfaction judgement, the scrutiny of triggers that cause varied customer behaviours in failure situations and devising of customer-driven recovery strategies that would yield preferred behaviours. In other words, that execution of customer satisfaction and handling of customer complaints depend heavily on actionable information (i.e., feedback gathered from valid and continuous measurement) should not be an overstatement. Thus, departing from the absence of a comprehensive treatment, this research based book attempts to fill the gap by addressing seven theoretically and managerially important issues.