Abstract: Hotel service failure is inevitable.However existing studies,having overwhelmingly focused on customers’ intolerance behaviors such as complaining,lack enough stress on studying customer forgiveness which,referring to the process of a possible customers’ response when facing a service failure,is a prerequisite for restoring a harmonious customer-employee relationship.Based on the "Stimulus-response" theory and "Stimulus-susceptibility model",this paper investigated the emotional and tolerant responses of customers under the stimulation of service failure,and analysed the regulatory effect of customer professionalism.In the scenario experiment,90 recruited college students participated in two experiments： one is negative emotion initiation experiment,and the other is customer forgiveness reaction experiment.The results show that： in emotional responses,service failure stimulates the negative emotion of the subjects; the main effect of service failure type on emotional valence is not significant; customer professionalism plays a regulatory role between service failure type and emotional valence; degrees of service failures reversely predict customer forgiveness; the type of a failure can regulate the reverse relationship between the degree of service failure and customer forgiveness,while the degree of customer professionalism can’t regulate the relationship between the degree of service failure and customer forgiveness.This study focused on the role of customer professionalism,complement,and developed the research on customer characteristics in service failure.Secondly,it mended up the lack of customer forgiveness behaviors in the studies of service failure,and found that customer forgiveness is a flexible concept in the context of service failure.It provided a new perspective and research paradigm for studies of service failure,and a practical suggestion for hotel service failure management.

Key words: hotel service failure, negative emotion, customer forgiveness, customer expertise