“Give me an upgrade or I will give you a bad review!” Investigating customer threats in the hospitality industry

Abstract

This work is a first attempt to explain the phenomenon of customer threats and identify the individual and situational factors that drive this phenomenon in tourism and hospitality. Towards this goal, one qualitative and two quantitative studies are employed. Study 1 conceptualizes customer threats by uncovering two of the most common forms of verbal threats (i.e., threat to switch and threat to negative word of mouth) and their distinctive features as well as customers’ motivations behind them, and some situational conditions that favor the enactment of customer threats. Using a survey-based approach, study 2 sheds light on three incident-specific drivers (i.e., psychological reactance, rumination, and justice perceptions) of the two main forms of customer threats. Finally, using an experimental approach, study 3 assesses the effectiveness of two service recovery strategies (self-service recovery vs. human-based recovery) at mitigating customer threats following service failure incidents.