An empirical investigation of impact of service recovery on customer satisfaction by State Tourism Corporations

Tourism has emerged as the largest service sector industry at the global level. In India, it has been contributing immensely towards GDP and employment generation. Taking this phenomenon into consideration, Government of India has been encouraging the states to open up their respective state tourism corporations. The present study is based on two such state tourism corporations of northern India namely Haryana Tourism Corporation and Himachal Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation. Whereas state of Himachal Pradesh is blessed with numerous natural attractions and pleasant weather throughout the year, however, Haryana is not that lucky. It is devoid of such attractions yet it has carved out several man made tourism attractions which has really placed it impressively on the national tourism map. The success of any organisation is governed by the satisfaction level of its customers. Providing quality services is one thing but being able to recover failure in providing such services is what matters the most. This study is an effort in this regard. It attempts to find out the extent to which these two corporations have been successful in recovering the lost services in the event of service failure. It primarily studies the impact of service recovery on satisfaction of customers of Haryana Tourism Corporation and Himachal Pradesh Tourism Development Corporation.

Empirical

Overall, the research findings points out that both the selected corporations have failed to impress its customers in its service recovery endeavours. They need to adopt a more proactive approach to satisfy the customers through service recovery process.

Service failure provides another opportunity to a service provider to impress the customers through successful service recovery. A better and more appropriate attempt at service recovery may make the recovered customers more satisfied than those who did not experienced failure in service at all.

The customers might not be well versed with the concept of service failure and service recovery which might have hindered their responses.