SERVICE FAILURES AND PERCEIVED FAIRNESS IN MALAYSIAN HOTELS- EVIDENCE FROM LOW-RATING CHINESE-LANGUAGE REVIEWS ON CTRIP AND AN ACTIONABLE RECOVERY PLAYBOOK

Abstract

Malaysia’s tourism growth agenda heightens the need for scalable hotel service-quality governance under the public visibility of review platforms. This study analyzes low-rating Chinese-language reviews of Malaysian hotels posted on Ctrip, treating low ratings as diagnostic texts that concentrate critical incidents and fairness cues. Using review-level multi-label coding anchored in a critical incident lens and a distributive–procedural–interactional justice framework, we identify recurring failure domains, test travel-type heterogeneity with category-wise association tests under false discovery rate control, assess robustness to an alternative low-rating threshold, and examine compound failures via co-occurrence intersections. The complaint landscape is highly concentrated: check-in/out and process failures (21.6%), cleanliness and hygiene failures (21.5%), and maintenance and facilities failures (17.9%) dominate low-score narratives, whereas other domains are notably less prevalent. Incident prevalence differs systematically across travel types, with residual-based contrasts indicating distinct segment emphases within the same overall hierarchy. The incident ordering remains stable when tightening the low-rating definition from rating < 3 to rating ≤ 2. Co-occurrence analysis shows that compound failures among the top three domains are common, suggesting layered vulnerabilities spanning front-desk workflow, housekeeping execution, and engineering response rather than isolated mishaps. Fairness-related complaints occur in a meaningful minority of low-score reviews and vary by travel type, while justice discourse is dominated by distributive and interactional concerns and procedural justice is least salient. The study contributes a monitorable recovery instrument that maps incident triggers to justice lenses, executable actions, and platform-reply SOP priorities, enabling hotels to standardize what is monitored and to audit recovery quality as a platform-facing capability.