Ljudevit Pranić

Rethinking service recovery: a customer empowerment (CE) perspective

Generally, complainants have been given little power to effect how their service recovery encounter unfolds. Meanwhile, the satisfactory resolution of customer complaints has been a challenging task for many service organizations. Empowering customers in service recovery provides a solution for this challenge. However, the studies on customer empowerment (CE) have taken very narrow perspectives of CE and therefore, none of them individually can explain the nature of CE in service recovery situations among various services that represent the services industry. Based upon the review of the previous research, this article proposes a more integrative theoretical framework in an attempt to better describe and explain the customers’ view of CE in the management of service recovery encounters. According to the proposed model, the degree of complainant-perceived empowerment during service recovery determines both the level of complainants affective/cognitive responses and the level of subsequent complaint satisfaction. Implications are provided and discussed from both practical and theoretical perspectives.

Host population perceptions of the social impacts of sport tourism events in transition countries: Evidence from Croatia

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate residents’ perceptions of social impacts from co‐hosting the 2009 World Mens Handball Championship (WMHC09) in a small Croatian city – Split – in response to the need for social impacts research at a variety of sport tourism events and locations. Additional analysis was performed on a number of socio‐demographic factors that may affect the magnitude of residents’ perceptions.Design/methodology/approach – A quantitative methodology was employed using a convenience sampling method. A drop and mail‐back technique with self‐completed surveys was used. A total of 92 completed surveys were returned. Mann‐Whitney U and Kruskal‐Wallis tests were used to test for patterns of social impacts across demographic variables.Findings – Overall, respondents’ perceived the social impacts from co‐hosting WMHC09 as mostly positive. However, the majority of respondents believed that the public monies spent on a new arena construction should have been allocated...

Development and validation of the customer empowerment scale in hotel service recovery

The purposes of this study were to develop a measurement scale for customer empowerment (CE) in hotel service recovery and to examine the role of three experiential features (i.e. the level of empowerment awarded to a guest by the hotel, service failure type, and hotel quality) in CE. The CE measurement scale was developed by following the procedures recommended by DeVellis (1991. Scale development: Theory and applications. Newbury Park, CA: Sage and 2003. Scale development. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage). The scale was tested and found to be both reliable and valid. Due to a repeated-measures design, the role of experiential features in CE was tested with linear mixed model analysis and it was found that the level of empowerment awarded to a guest by the hotel in response to his or her complaint, as well as the severity of the service failure that caused him or her to complain, influences the degree of empowerment as perceived by that guest. However, CE is not likely to increase or decrease as a result of the number of ‘stars’ that a hotel has. Based on this studys results, theoretical and managerial implications and opportunities for future research are further discussed.