When customers like preferential recovery (and when not)?

Tourism managers have a long-held belief that preferential recovery helps mitigate customers' negative reactions following a service failure. This research investigates the joint effects of recovery type (preferential vs. non-preferential) and status (high vs. low) on customer responses. Five experiments provide converging evidence to demonstrate that low status customers are more satisfied with non-preferential (vs. preferential) recovery and show higher patronage intention, whereas their high-status counterparts tend to be indifferent. Moreover, such joint effects are moderated by interpersonal similarity and failure similarity. The mediation analyses reveal that fairness perceptions are the psychological mechanism underlying these effects. Together, these findings provide important implications for tourism firms' service recovery practices. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

The research suggests that low-status customers prefer non-preferential recovery, while high-status customers tend to be indifferent. The effects are moderated by interpersonal and failure similarity, with fairness perception being the psychological mechanism underlying these effects. These findings have important implications for service recovery practices in tourism firms.