After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

13.1  Explain how guests respond when the guest experience fails to meet their expectations.

13.2  Describe how organizations should respond when the experience fails to meet guest expectations.

13.3  Explain how organizations prepare their employees to find and fix failures.

13.4  Explain why positive word of mouth is so valuable and bad word of mouth so harmful.

13.5  Express why the recovery method for handling a service failure is so important.

13.6  State why fixing service failures quickly and fairly—on the spot, if possible—is so important.

13.7  Recognize how to learn from service failures.

13.8  Describe how guests evaluate the hospitality organization’s recovery efforts.

13.9  Match the recovery strategy to the failure.