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 complainant's affective/cognitive responses and the level of subsequent complaint satisfaction. Implications are provided and discussed from both practical and theoretical perspectives.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate residents’ perceptions of social impacts from co‐hosting the 2009 World Men's 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 to construct facilities for which there is a greater public need (healthcare centers, schools, etc.). Variations in respondents’ perceptions generally could not be explained by their socio‐demographic characteristics.Practical implications: Any future decisions to use public monies for one‐time financially intensive events should perhaps be subjected to a decision by a popular vote.Originality/value: This is one of the few studies to examine the residents’ perceptions of the social impacts of sport tourism events in transition countries. It also extends social exchange theory and reports validity and reliability of the social impacts scale.

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 study's results, theoretical and managerial implications and opportunities for future research are further discussed.

Purpose – To improve the employability of tourism and hospitality (T&H) graduates, faculty must continually reassess what soft skills are essential for T&H graduates to possess and amend their curricula to meet these needs. Thus, this study aims to identify the soft skills perceived as essential for the T&H graduates through a systematic literature review (SLR). Methodology – Google Scholar was systematically queried from 1990 to April 2018, resulting in 77 T&H soft skills-related peer-reviewed publications. Four T&H researchers/educators produced an initial pool of 1447 T&H soft skills from these publications, categorized them in either conceptual/creative, leadership or interpersonal dimensions of Sandwith’s (1993) Competency Domain Model and trimmed for relevance. Finally, the elicited key soft skills were further edited via an online survey of 19 T&H researchers/educators from Italy, Malta, Portugal, and Spain. The relevance of generated soft skills was double-verified thought same SLR based process for literature from April 2018 onwards. Findings – A final set of 30 items emerged – 10 items per each of the three soft skills dimensions – i.e. conceptual/creative, leadership, and interpersonal. Based on these findings, both T&H higher education institutions and faculty should evaluate their classes/curricula to determine whether a particular soft skill identified in this study is included as a learning objective of one or more specific classes. Contribution – The main contribution lies in devising a theoretically-and methodologically-based list of key soft skills for a broad range of segments of the T&H industry. From a methodological point of view, the SLR conducted is considered as novelty in T&H soft skills research. Practically, this study provides educators with an updated benchmark tool to identify gaps in the curriculum. The related positive implications are expected for the students and T&H industry as well.

The Purpose – An evaluation of 197 hotel websites in Croatia was conducted to determine whether hotels in this economically lagging transition country exploit the potentials of the Internet as a marketing tool. Design/Methodology/Approach – A team of 30 trained assistants evaluated the websites using an amended modified Balanced Scorecard (mBSC) approach from the user-friendliness, site attractiveness, marketing effectiveness, and F&B informativeness perspectives. MANOVA was used to test main and interaction effects of hotel size, quality rating, and location on four website performance perspectives. Findings – Although hoteliers recognize the importance of online presence, most are not effectively using websites from the user-friendliness, marketing effectiveness, and F&B perspectives. Hotel quality rating, location, and their two-way interaction are significant in explaining differences in site attractiveness and marketing effectiveness. Hotel size does not explain the differences among the four website perspectives. Originality – In lieu of the rapidly evolving IT and consumer trends, this study provides hoteliers with an updated website assessment tool that can serve as a point of comparison against contemporary e-marketing approaches. Moreover, since tourism website evaluation is an under researched topic in transition economies, this article makes a contribution in the needed direction. The study ends with a discussion of results and implications for hoteliers, policy makers, and scholars.