When customers like preferential recovery (and when not)?

Tourism managers have a long-held belief that preferential recovery helps mitigate customers' negative reactions following a service failure. This research investigates the joint effects of recovery type (preferential vs. non-preferential) and status (high vs. low) on customer responses. Five experiments provide converging evidence to demonstrate that low status customers are more satisfied with non-preferential (vs. preferential) recovery and show higher patronage intention, whereas their high-status counterparts tend to be indifferent. Moreover, such joint effects are moderated by interpersonal similarity and failure similarity. The mediation analyses reveal that fairness perceptions are the psychological mechanism underlying these effects. Together, these findings provide important implications for tourism firms' service recovery practices.