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.

Deciding what value to offer to customers is a key managerial task in differentiating a service in the market and in satisfying customer needs better than competitors. This task is more critical for B2B services because customer satisfaction results from both the customer’s actual experience with the service and the ongoing interactions a customer has with the service provider. Previous research supports this view by showing that a service’s performance and relational value offerings are paramount in driving customer satisfaction; however, the distinct effect of each of these value offerings on customer satisfaction has not been fully explained. Using a multi-informant design and data from 173 B2B service firms, our study provides a deeper understanding of how the outcomes of performance and relational value vary at different levels of customer participation and supplier collaboration in a B2B service project. This deeper understanding helps managers to identify precisely the conditions under which a specific configuration of performance and relational value offerings is more or less influential with respect to customer satisfaction.