Hospitality for All: Addressing Service Failures Toward Guests With Disabilities

Abstract

This teaching case centers on Sunshine Café, where a planned visit from a group of special needs students exposes a critical service breakdown. Despite prior communication with management, the group’s arrival was mishandled, leading to staff confusion, hesitation in service delivery, and guest discomfort. The central dilemma lies in how the restaurant manager and staff should respond in real time to balance inclusivity, operational pressures, and reputational risks. To highlight the broader industry relevance, the case also draws on real-world incidents such as the wrongful denial of service to a patron with a facial disfigurement and the refusal to seat special needs students as supporting examples that underscore systemic shortcomings in ADA compliance and staff preparedness. To address these issues, the case introduces a metaverse-based training intervention that immerses learners in realistic, role-playing scenarios to practice both failure identification and recovery techniques. The overarching objective of this case is to sensitize hospitality management students to the importance of inclusive, empathetic, and legally compliant service, particularly for vulnerable populations. Students critically assess causes and consequences of service failure and explore strategies for recovery and guest relations. The accompanying teaching note highlights learning outcomes in which students analyze service failures, assess ethical and legal implications, propose empathetic and feasible recovery strategies, apply concepts from emotional intelligence and service recovery theory, evaluate metaverse-based versus traditional training, and design strategies to promote inclusive service environments. Designed for 90 to 120-min sessions, the module aims to strengthen ethical reasoning, critical thinking, crisis communication, and leadership under pressure, equipping future hospitality leaders to transform service failures into opportunities for guest loyalty and to leverage advanced technologies for consistent, scalable staff training.