Contemplating museums’ service failure: Extracting the service quality dimensions of museums from negative on-line reviews

Abstract

Museums are important attractions in contemporary cultural tourism, which has brought them economic benefit as well as managerial challenges. Museums' mandate of custodianship and curatorial and educational focus on tangible artifacts and facilities has been diverted to and augmented by the intangible memories, emotions, and experiences of visitors and tourists. Identifying museum service failures from social media is complementary to, rather than a contradiction of, museum visitor satisfaction assessment. This study, through adoption of interdisciplinary literature, has extracted twelve service qualities— assurance, reliability, responsiveness, tangibles, empathy, communication, consumables, convenience, servicescape, purposiveness, contemplation, and first-hand experience—as grounds for contemplating conception and operation of museum tourism as well as consumer-based museum servicescapes. • Investigate tourists' complaints as evidence for the service failure of museums. • Conduct a content analysis of negative TripAdvisor reviews about museum. • Twelve dimensions of service quality for museums are extracted. • Solutions for the service failure of museums are discussed. • Results facilitate museums to contemplate their service quality and design.