The service failure phenomenon is a long-recognized problem in hospitality industry’s marketing, and has consequently attracted significant research attention (Chan, Wan, & Sin, 2007). Once service failures occur, customers usually assess the causes of the problem. Researchers have thus studied the impact of service failures on customer failure attribution and their behavioral outcomes toward the service provider. Usually, studies examine consumer psychological processes when only one service firm is involved. However, it is unclear whether customer failure assessments are the same when they have to assess more than one service at the same time. According to a review article by Cohen, Prayag, and Moital (2014), consumer behavior has been extensively examined in the field of tourism in many aspects (e.g., decision making, motivations, satisfaction, and loyalty); however, research assessing failure attribution within tourist satisfaction literature is still rare. Moreover, in service marketing studies, it is somewhat surprising that existing service research has overlooked the fact that customers may confront failure situations where there are two or more service providers involved (Weber & Sparks, 2010). Hence, this study makes two key contributions. First, it addresses scholars’ calls for more research assessing failure attribution within a tourist satisfaction context. Second, it contributes to our understanding of consumer behavior in tourism industry by studying customer perceptions of service failures within service networks, where at least two firms are involved in the incident. This study uses in-depth interviews for data collection. And interview results indicate that relational and network characteristics have a significant influence on how customers attribute service failures to different service providers.

• Chutinida Phalusuk(Newcastle University, UK)
• Markus Blut(Aston University, UK)
• Klaus Schoefer(Newcastle University, UK)
• Mitchell Ness(Newcastle University, UK)