Service failure research in the hospitality and tourism industry: a synopsis of past, present and future dynamics from 2001 to 2020

Purpose - When service failure occurs, it leads to dissatisfaction, lack of trust and avoidance behaviour among customers, and it can also be seen as a threat to the survival of the business. This paper investigates the current and potential dynamics of service failure research within the tourism and hospitality area.
Design/methodology/approach - By adopting qualitative, quantitative (citation and text mining) and science-mapping tools (descriptive, conceptual, and intellectual), we analyse 99 key papers on service failure in 18 major hospitality and tourism journals over a 20-year span.
Findings - The research on service recovery strategies, recovery efforts, pre-, and post-failure, and post-recovery in the service encounter, and the impacts of justice on post-recovery and post-complaint behaviour are identified as the major streams of service failure research. While emotional labour, rumination, and satisfaction recovery were identified as emerging themes, service failure perceptions and social media were found as the developed and substantial trends.
Practical implications - We present a comprehensive understanding of service failure research development in the hospitality and tourism industry. We propose three areas – circumstantial cues, interactional cues, and crisis management – that practitioners need to understand in order to minimise service failure during the service interaction.
Originality – To the best of our knowledge, no prior bibliometric study has investigated the current and future dynamics of service failure in the hospitality and tourism industry and offered a research agenda based on this gap in the literature.

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