Beyond complainers: reclassifying customers of travel agency regarding post-failure behavior and loyalty performance

ABSTRACT

Focusing on negative emotions and compensation preference, this article innovatively classifies customers encountering service failure into four types: troublesome, opportunistic, emotional and friendly. To test the rationality of the classification, loyalty differences were examined in both core service failure and interpersonal service failure scenarios by a scenario-based experimental method. The results reveal that customers show different loyalty in these two scenarios. Friendly customers have higher loyalty than the other three, while troublesome customers are least loyal. Emotional and opportunistic customers’ loyalty is similar and falls between the extremes. The targeted remedies are discussed for travel agencies and tourism organizations.

KEYWORDS:

• Service failure
• negative emotion
• compensation preference
• customer classification
• customer loyalty
• travel agency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Sichuan Province Science and Technology Plan Project (to Zhiyong Li): [grant number 2019YFS0078]; National Social Science Foundation of China (to Zhiyong Li): [grant number 17XGL012]; Sichuan university (to Zhiyong Li): [grant number 2019hhs-13].