The Effect of Service Recovery on Guest Satisfaction in Iran's Hospitality Industry (Providing an Operational Solution)

Service providers are strongly concerned about the negative effects of service failure. Therefore, the negative effects of failures can be reduced by allocating appropriate service recovery efforts.
This exploratory research aimed to find the reasons for customer complaints and service failure and provide solutions for service recovery in the hospitality industry. Hence, a qualitative approach was adopted and the critical incident technique (CIT) was used to analyze the opinions of experts in the field. Then, the purposive sampling method and the snowball sampling method were employed to interview 15 experts in the hospitality industry, and their views were extracted and studied using the phenomenological paradigm and Delphi method.
According to the results, it was found that most of the participants of the research chose the hotel through the introduction of friends, the respective architecture and service, a work mission, advertising, accompanying foreign guests, previous stay history, and reputation in the service provision. However, the participants mentioned failure to meet expectations, improper behavior, higher prices, nonprofessional personnel (lack of needs assessment), lack of mastery of menu items, and lack of facilities and hygiene items as the factors influencing service failure. According to the results, behavioral protocols and guidelines, guests’ opinions, management experience, supervision, training, and opinions of personnel can be used to improve service delivery. Moreover, the hotel policies in service recovery were known to be the transparent process of complaint investigation, assessment of customer satisfaction, and assurance to guests to solve the problem.