Customer Evaluations of Tour Operators' Responses to Their Complaints

Despite compelling evidence linking complaint handling to subsequent consumer behaviour, relatively little progress has been made in developing a theoretical understanding of how consumers evaluate a company's response to their complaints. This paper reports on an exploratory study, which uses perceived justice theory as a conceptual framework, to examine the way in which customers respond to complaint handling. Tourism provides the context for the research and the data is generated through a series of in-depth interviews. The results indicate that concepts associated with perceived justice, namely interactional, procedural, and distributive justice, is relevant to consumers' evaluations of complaint handling. In particular, the fairness of the resolution procedures (distributive justice), the interpersonal communication and behaviour (interactional justice) speed and convenience of the process (procedural justice) were confirmed as important evaluative criteria of the customer.