Service Guarantees and Opportunistic Behavior in a Leisure Setting: The Influence of Selected Personal and Situational Variables

Abstract

Enhancing participant satisfaction is an ongoing concern for leisure providers. The service guarantee is one tool that has been promoted to increase participant satisfaction and subsequent loyalty. Although guarantee initiatives have been used successfully in a variety of settings for a number of years, many remain skeptical about their utility. In particular, providers fear that program participants may engage in fraud by feigning dissatisfaction in order to obtain unwarranted refunds. The purpose of this study was to explore both situational and personal conditions under which the fraudulent use of service guarantees is more or less likely to occur.

This study used an experimental design. Participants were exposed to hypothetical scenarios in which an individual named Chris spent the day at a ski center that offered a 100% money-back guarantee. Chris was described either as having visited the center earlier with plans to return (high relationship scenario) or as being a first-time visitor with no plans to return (low relationship scenario). The price of the day (lift tickets and rentals) was set at either $35 (low material gain scenario) or $125 (high material gain scenario). A 2 ? 2 factorial design was used, so participants received high and/or low combinations of each message. Participants answered a series of questions about the likelihood that Chris would fraudulently invoke the guarantee to obtain a refund. Chris was reported to have had a satisfactory, but not exceptional, day of skiing.

Results indicated that the potential for material gain and the extent of the relationship had a cumulative effect on participants’ predictions that Chris would act in a fraudulent manner. Those in the low relationship/high material gain group were most likely to predict that Chris would ask for a refund. In addition, participants reported that high levels of personal contact (required to invoke the guarantee) and exceptional (rather than simply adequate) service levels would decrease the likelihood of fraudulent behavior. Large corporations were viewed as more likely victims of fraud than were smaller operations.

Study participants with high levels of Machiavellianism and high propensity to accept cheating behavior were more likely than their counterparts to believe that cheating was likely by characters described in the scenarios. However, we found that those most involved with skiing or who reported a tendency to complain when dissatisfied were not more likely to predict that cheating would take place within the scenarios. In others words, neither enthusiasm for the activity, or for complaining itself, were related to their predictions about cheating. In the former case, providers can be comforted knowing that those who most often take part are not any more likely to support cheating on guarantees. In the latter case, they can be comforted knowing that those with the greatest propensity to complain are not necessarily those most willing to make frivolous complaints. Taken together, users with whom leisure providers are likely to have the greatest contact (high involvement individuals who are willing to complain) do not represent any additional risk in terms of fraudulent behavior.