Introduction
Academic research on service failure and recovery is relatively recent and still evolving. To date, it has focused on several conceptual and theoretical considerations, incorporated varying research methodologies and has been conducted in a diversity of industries. The researchers believe that there is scope for further research and chose to pursue a project in the hotel industry, which is of particular interest for several reasons.
The hotel industry involves a high degree of interaction between employees and consumers and so provides many opportunities for service failures to occur. The quality of service encounters is frequently determined by the actions of front-line staff, whose experience and commitment may be limited and whose attitudes may vary from one encounter to another. The inseparability of production and consumption means that failures occur at the point of consumption