It is high season for customer complaints, when tourists take to social media to complain about their hotels or whine about expensive outings that failed to live up to expectations.

For years, customer reps took comfort from the “service recovery paradox”, the counter-intuitive idea that, if they handled a complaint well, their company would emerge with an higher reputation than before.

To me, this notion has always looked as unsteady as a cheap deckchair on the beach. The proliferation of complaints on social media is bringing it closer to collapse. How people react when things go wrong surely depends on how much they suffer. Studies back my hunch. The paradox does exist but generally only when the service failure is not that severe, it has not happened before and the company had little control over what went wrong.