Abstract
Advances in technology have brought back the concept of home sharing and transformed it into a global phenomenon that is peer-to-peer (P2P) accommodation. Yet, the vast growth of P2P accommodation also pairs with increasing customers’ dissatisfaction. There is an increasing evidence of guests experiencing service failures during their stay with P2P accommodation, resulting from various service encounters, such as guest-host relations, technological challenges, customer service interactions, etc. Though the concept of service failure has received considerable attention in the past, most studies have been limited to investigating its patterns and impacts from a dyadic customer – provider relationship perspective, where the provider is solely responsible for service failure. Through P2P platforms, how service is delivered and experienced is fundamentally changed as more entities are involved in service system. In P2P accommodation system, service is delivered through different service encounters within the triadic relationship: customer – service provider encounter and customer – platform provider encounter. This new form of service delivery has been neglected in current service failure research. Therefore, in order to fill the research gap and provide managerial implications, this study explores the major forms of service failure in P2P accommodation and provides effective recovery strategies accordingly.