Abstract
Due to increased competition in the hospitality industry, the importance of managing and maintaining service quality has never been greater. There is a dearth of research in the identification of failure factors in the hospitality industry despite its significance in influencing service quality. Thus, the aim of this study is to identify critical failures from the customers' perspective in the context of resort hotels in Langkawi. Critical Incident Technique (CIT) was employed and only critical failure incidents were collected in this study. Purposive sampling was applied to get the sample of respondents who were resort customers visiting Langkawi Island. Content analysis was performed on the data collected which has resulted in a classificatory schema of four categories and twelve sub-categories of failure incidents reported. The attribution of these critical failure factors was also acknowledged. The results revealed that the two largest categories of service failures that resort customers normally encounter were related to service delivery system failure and natural environment while the most reported problematic incidents were regarding product problems and animal issues. Most of the reported incidents were attributed to the resort while problems related to animals were generally externally attributed. This study has surfaced the need to identify common failure factors in the resort hotel context thus corrective efforts can be forwarded to prevent failure re-occurrences in the future.