Making sense of tourists' complaints

The problem of dealing with tourists' complaints is not fully covered in the tourism literature. This article discusses the quality of the data available on tourists' complaints and it is proposed that two concepts from social psychological research can be used to interpret and understand them; first, the notion of ‘fit’ between tourists and the environments they visit; second, the concept of attribution theory is shown to be useful for understanding the process by which tourists allocate blame and responsibility.