Microsoft Word 2007 ichrie conference Proceedings Final-Final 06-06-07. doc

CONCLUSIONS AND AVENUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH 
The results of this study provide useful insights on the behavior of hotel guests who experienced faulty service 
together with subsequent follow-up action of service recovery. The study results are enlightening the efforts of hotel 
management who pursues to ensure that the hotel guests perceive a higher level of satisfaction than those who did 
not encounter a service breakdown. The empirical results testing the relationships among satisfaction, service 
recovery, trust, commitment, and loyalty demonstrated that all hypothesized relationships except the one between 
satisfaction and commitment were supported. The findings also show that the effect of satisfaction with service 
recovery on trust is significant and positive (Tax et al., 1998), and in turn the trust is positively associated with 
commitment (Bowen & Shoemaker, 1998). Trust as an important antecedent of commitment coincides with Morgan 
& Hunt (1994)’s argument that trust and commitment play an important role to continuous customer relationship. In 
particular, the significant and positive effect of recovery satisfaction on loyalty confirms a “recovery paradox” in 
that service recovery efforts after failure could ultimately enhance the customer relationship (McCollough, 2000). 
This corroborates that a customer can build on a positive feeling by the efforts of effective service recovery from 
hotels, and the relationship between the service provider and customer can be fortified, even though a hotel guest 
encounters faulty service (Smith et al., 1999). Wirtz and Mattila (2004) suggested that effective service recovery 
would be one of the important factors in attaining customer repatronage. The effect of trust on loyalty was found to 
be significant and positive (Crosby, 1990), and the commitment was positively associated with loyalty (Garbarino & 
Johnson, 1999).

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