Risk Evaluation of Group Package Tour Service Failures that Result in Third-Party Complaints

ABSTRACT

Third-party complaints usually indicate the most egregious service failures and represent customers’ higher order actions. To reduce or eliminate these critical failures and protect the long-term profits of service firms, the major potential failure modes need to be identified to enable preventive action. There is scant information in the tourism literature on third-party complaints about group package tours. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the risk prioritization of the critical potential service failure modes that result in third-party complaints about Taiwanese outbound group package tours. A novel approach to risk evaluation is used. Some managerial implications are addressed.

Keywords:

• Service failure
• third-party complaints
• group package tour
• failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA)
• data envelopment analysis (DEA)

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the Taiwan Tourism Bureau and the Travel Quality Assurance Association (TQAA) for their support of the questionnaire survey using convenience sampling. The authors would also like to express appreciation to C. Y. Chen, an official of the Tourism Bureau; and M. H. Wu, the vice secretary general of the TQAA, for their kind assistance with this survey. The authors would like to express deep gratitude to the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this article.