Service recovery in the airline industry: a cross‐cultural comparison of the attitudes and behaviours of British and Italian front‐line personnel

This study investigates the attitudes and behaviour of airline front‐line personnel in Britain and Italy, in situations of service failure and recovery. Attitudes towards service recovery are explored through hypothetical scenarios in a questionnaire, and actual behaviours are recorded by using the critical incident technique. The results show that respondents’ attitudes toward service recovery differ by nationality with regard to their affectivity, their group orientation, and to whom they confer authority. With respect to behaviour, satisfactory outcomes from service recovery situations seem to be attributed to different factors by the two nationalities.