Antecedents and consequence of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction: A study of tourism services

Abstract

Many recent studies have focused on satisfaction as one of key concepts in consumer behavior while dissatisfaction has received a much lesser attention. In services where failure is inevitable, customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction may be interwoven along the service buying/ using process. This study examines simultaneously the effect of four service attributes on customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction which lead to the word-of-mouth effect. SEM analysis based on a sample of 382 customers of package tour service reveals that staff attitude and failure recovery have positive effects on satisfaction, but not on dissatisfaction. Then, satisfaction, but not dissatisfaction has a positive impact on word-of-mouth. A negative correlation has also been found between satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Discussions and implications are presented along these statistical results.