Webcare quality in the hotel industry: scale development and validation

Hospitality businesses are highly vulnerable to service failures due to their people-centric approach, experiential nature of the products, and service characteristics (Koc et al., 2017). This leads to dissatisfied customers who often share their experiences through negative online reviews (NORs) (Ullrich and Brunner, 2015). These NORs are highly influential and cause numerous detrimental impacts on various aspects of the hotel business (Wen et al., 2021). Phase One of this PhD study analysed online consumer complaining behaviour to identify service gaps. This paper discusses Phase Two of the study, which examines Webcare; management responses to NORs, as an online service recovery strategy.