Customer experience in the tourism industry: Determinants influencing complaint behaviour

Abstract

The customer service experience with a specific travel agency is a kind of moment of truth. Customer satisfaction is the outcome they have experienced when service performance met expectations. Contrary to satisfaction, consumers may experience dissatisfaction with the provided service. One of the responses to dissatisfaction is a consumer complaint. Apart from feeling satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the provided service, consumers may also be satisfied or unsatisfied with the complaint process. The aim of this paper is to identify differences in the determinants of complaint behavior (tendency to file a complaint, justice of interaction, perception of fairness, satisfaction with the complaint handling process and loyalty) between female and male respondents. Field research was conducted meaning that the primary data were collected through a survey. The paper presents the respondents' assessments of the set statements regarding experiences during the complaint process. To meet the research objectives, the Mann-Whitney U test was applied, which is used to examine the differences between the two independent groups as a nonparametric alternative to the t-test of independent samples.