PENGARUH PROFESIONALISME FRONT DESK AGENT DALAM PENANGANAN KELUHAN (SERVICE RECOVERY) TERHADAP MINAT KUNJUNGAN ULANG TAMU DI HOTEL ARYADUTA MANADO

Abstract

This study examines how the professionalism of Front Desk Agents (FDA) shapes service recovery and guests’ intention to revisit, while testing whether service recovery mediates that relationship at Hotel Aryaduta Manado. Adopting a quantitative design, the research applied saturated sampling to 30 respondents—every guest who lodged a complaint between March and May 2026 according to the hotel’s official complaint log. Data gathered through Likert-scale questionnaires were processed using path analysis in SPSS version 27, complemented by the Sobel test for the mediation pathway. The findings reveal that FDA professionalism exerts a positive and significant effect on service recovery (B = 0.658; Sig. = 0.001; R² = 0.450), that service recovery in turn significantly raises revisit intention (B = 0.609; Sig. = 0.004), and that service recovery significantly mediates the link between professionalism and revisit intention (Sobel Z = 2.407; indirect effect = 0.401), pointing to partial mediation. These results substantiate the Service Recovery Paradox in a four-star hotel setting in Manado and position FDA professionalism as a strategic asset operating through two simultaneous routes—directly cultivating guest loyalty and indirectly through effective service recovery.