The current study develops a pair model considering the intensity of negative emotions and strategic combinations of recovery means and timing under hotel service failure scenarios. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the performances of these different combinations through customer satisfaction, repurchase intention, and fitting curves between the two under Chinese hotel service scenarios. Previous studies have found that service failures cause economic losses as well as negative emotional responses from customers (Grönroos, 1984; McColl Kennedy and Sparks, 2003). However, customers might display higher satisfaction and purchase intentions when proper service recovery actions are taken instead of when no service failures occur (Smith et al., 1999; McCollough et al., 2000). Concerning the means of service recovery during a service failure, customers in a negative emotional state require specific recovery solutions from the service provider; concerning the timing of service recovery, immediate recovery appears to be an effective way to address customer complaints (Kelley et al., 1993). While, previous research has partially shown that for extremely angry customers, the performance of “as soon as possible” recovery is unsatisfying and may even cause the service recovery to fail (Mattila and Ro, 2008). A 2 (recovery timing: immediate/delayed) × 2 (recovery means: psychological/economic) × 3 (type of service failure: failure in a delivery system/failure in responding to customer needs/improper employee behavior) between-subject experimental design was employed with 456 part-time MBA students in China to examine the relationship between customer satisfaction and repurchase intention under different levels of negative emotion after experienced a service failure. The results suggest that immediate and economic recovery effectively raises the service recovery evaluations from customers with low-intensity negative emotions, whereas delayed and psychological recovery helps customers with high-intensity negative emotions to give higher evaluations. This study sheds light on the role that negative emotions play in the process of service recovery and provides implications for service industry managers, that is the decisions to use economic recovery or psychological recovery are necessitate consider the intensity characteristic of negative emotions, for customers in low-intensity negative emotional states, the immediate and economic recovery strategy is effective, whereas for customers in high-intensity negative emotional states, the delayed and psychological recovery strategy may lead to better outcomes. According to these findings, it is important for managers to train front-line staff to adopt proper recovery strategies to manage service failure when facing consumers with different intensity of negative emotion.

• Xiaofei Tang(Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, China)
• En-Chung Chang(Renmin University of China, China)
• Xing Huang(Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, China)
• Meng Zhang(Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, China)
• Beixi Wen(Renmin University of China)