The role of tour guide attractiveness in service failure recovery: Insights from methodological triangulation

Service failures (SFs) represent an inevitable reality in package tourism due to provider interdependence and sustained frontline contact. As experiential ambassadors, tour guides (TGs) play a pivotal role in service failure recovery (SFR). This study examines how TG profiles -combining physical attractiveness (PA) and gender-are associated with tourists’ evaluations of service failure recovery (SFR). Employing methodological triangulation, this study combines a scenario-based survey ( N = 134) and an eye-tracking (ET) experiment ( N = 26) to investigate tourists’ explicit evaluations and gaze-based visual attention to outcome failure recovery (OFR) and process failure recovery (PFR). Across both studies, the attractive-female profile rather than unattractive-male guide profile in the outcome failure scenario was associated with higher SFRS, TGS, and tour firm recommendation intention (TFRI). However, these profile advantages attenuate during process failures (PFs) and do not extend to deeper behavioural commitments, such as service failure forgiveness (SFF) or avoidance of negative word-of-mouth. Descriptive gaze patterns reveal that while attractive visual cues capture longer visual attention duration, implicit visual fixation does not directly translate into conscious post-recovery approval. Overall, the findings position frontline appearance as a context-dependent profile cue rather than a universal determinant of service recovery, while demonstrating the value of comparing explicit evaluations with gaze-based attention measures.