An examination of explanation typology on perceived informational fairness in the context of air travel

Given humans' need to understand why things go wrong, "offering an explanation" is a type of service recovery effort that can be essential in the recovery process. Despite the importance of service failure explanations to academics and practitioners, research on this topic is scant. To bridge that gap, this study investigates the impact of various types of failure explanations on customer perceptions of informational fairness in the context of air travel. The results show that the type of explanation and the severity of the failure both result in different levels of perceived informational fairness. Moreover, different levels of perceived informational fairness can influence customer satisfaction through reduced attribution of responsibility for the failure to the service provider.