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| A STUDY REVIEW ON OVERSEAS TOURISTS' COMPLAINTS |
| XU Xing-an, ZHANG Meng |
| School of Business Administration, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, Chengdu 611130, China |
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Abstract The issue of tourist's complaints has aroused worldwide concern since the 1980s and its research was derived from consumer behavior research. This paper made an analysis of relevant literatures regarding tourist's complaints. This paper, after conducting a literature review regarding tourist's complaints, hold the view that four themes about overseas researches on tourist's complaints were: constraining factors and reasons of tourist's complaints; contents of tourist's complaints; behavioral patterns of tourist's complaints; controls of tourist's complaints. Every theme has been summarized in the hope of providing references for the related research and practice of tourist's complaints in China. Study found that constraints of tourist's complaints included time, familiarity, communication, involvement, holiday mood and cultural differences; tourist's discontentment was necessary but not sufficient condition of tourists' complaints; specific structure of tourism industry is the objective reason of tourists' complaints, inconsistency between tourist's expectation and reality was the subjective reason for tourist's complaints. From the perspective of the whole tourism industry, the main content of tourist's complaints included delayed or canceled flights, reception problems, luggage losing, overcharged, unavailable advertising facilities and so on; from the perspective of tourism destination, tourist's complaints about the content of the tourist destination came to all aspects like the tourist destination services, facilities, human and natural environment. Behavioral patterns of tourist's complaints included negative word-of-mouth, silent boycott, direct complaints and third-party complaint. Tourist's complaints should be controlled from perceptive justice, complaints' reasons and quality management. At last, this paper made an outlook for the influencing factors of tourists' complaints, research models and research methods, online tourists' complaints. In addition, characteristics of tourist's online complaints as a new complaining pattern, similarities and differences between offline complaints and online complaints, and the control of online complaints would be the focus of future research.
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Received: 10 January 2012
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2013, Vol. 28 
