The services industry is the fastest growing sector of the global economy, and central to its success. This research is concerned with observations of service recovery and its impact on customer satisfaction, and focuses on recovery after service failure, including factors such as compensation, speed, and apology, and their effect on customer perceptions of justice, including distributive, procedural and interactional justice. This exploratory and explanatory study seeks to provide information and understanding of the impact of service recovery and customer satisfaction on each other, by investigating the effect of service failure and recovery on customer perceptions of justice in two Libyan airlines.\ud
The theoretical framework of the study is derived from the literature, and is based on a set of interlinking relationships between elements of service recovery (apology, speed and compensation), their effect on customer perceptions of justice (interactional, distributive and procedural) and their logical outcome, which is customer satisfaction. Central to the framework is the conceptualisation of a model of service failure, perceptions of justice, and service recovery as a single continuous process which has as its outcome a level of customer satisfaction.\ud
The study starts from the theoretical view point that justice is a necessary component of customer satisfaction, and uses a questionnaire to collect data relevant to the three issues (service recovery, justice and customer satisfaction), which appear in the theoretical model. A total of 584 questionnaires were distributed to the customers of two Libyan airlines at Tripoli‟s international airport, collecting data customer perceptions of service failure recovery efforts. The statistical package SPSS was employed to analyse the raw data and the findings represent a set of relationships established between elements of service recovery and perceptions of justice.\ud
The study represents a contribution to knowledge about the relationships between service recovery and justice, using data collected in a developing country and in an industry of vital importance to national development yet opens to international competition. Theoretical and methodological contributions in the form of the study‟s model and questionnaire establish a basis for further research into this area in other developing countries and other industries