International Journal of Tourism Sciences, Volume 13, Number 1, pp. 1-26, 2013 Tourism Sciences Society of Korea. All rights reserved. Complaining Behaviors in Restaurants New Roles in Failure Scenarios Jalayer Khalilzadeh † Allameh Tabatabai’ University, Zeynab Rajabi  Allameh Tabatabai’ University, Melissa Farboudi Jahromi  Allameh Tabatabai’ University ABSTRACT: Customers’ complaining behavior has become a key issue in the restaurant industry. The present study investigated the effects of customer involvement, service stages and failure severity as manipulating factors on customers’ complaining behavior in fine dining restaurants. Based on a 2×4×2 between subjects experiment, data were collected from a sample of 714 randomly selected Iranian customers of 4 well known fine dining restaurants of Tehran. Public actions, negative marketing actions, and asking for recovery actions were extracted by an exploratory factor analysis as the three main components of complaint behavior. Also, a discriminant analysis was performed to determine the underlined construct of components, and 3-way factorial ANOVAs and MANOVA tests were administered to examine the effects and interactions. Most of the effects were meaningful especially in case of service stages and failure severity. Findings showed that different interactions of factors resulted in different components of complaint behavior. Due to the nature of these components, their consequent damages were significant and hidden for managers/owners in some cases. In other cases, customers provide an opportunity of recovery for restaurants. In general, study findings have major contributions to the better understanding of different service failures and help both researchers and restaurant managers to deal with them effectively. Also, precious suggestions in the conclusion section are useful for avoiding failures, especially serious ones, in food establishments. Keywords: Customer involvement; Failure severity; Service stages; Consumer complaint behavior † Department of Tourism Management, Allameh Tabatabai’ University, Iran. E-mail:jalayerk@gmail.com * Department of Tourism Management, Allameh Tabatabai’ University, Iran E-mail:reyhanehrajabi@gmail.com ** Department of Tourism Management, Allameh Tabatabai’ University, Iran E-mail:mfarboudi@gmail.com