Will you miss me if I am leaving? Unexpected market withdrawal of Norwegian Joy and customer satisfaction

The first “Made in Germany, Designed for Chinese” luxury cruise, Norwegian Joy, announced an unexpected Chinese-market-withdrawal decision on July 14th, 2018, less than a year after her maiden voyage from Shanghai. How does customer satisfaction change as a response to a cruise's market-withdrawal decision? By resorting to the confirmation of expectation theory, our paper highlights satisfaction as being a function of the baseline effect of expectations plus perceived disconfirmation of expectations. We propose that customer satisfaction will rise because the withdrawal decision implies strategic mistake of the cruise and therefore lowers customer expectation. Drawing on customers' comments on the largest travel agency website in China, we conducted sentiment analysis and used ‘difference in difference’ statistical approach to test our hypothesis. Results show that customer satisfaction increased after Norwegian Joy's withdrawal announcement. •This paper mobilizes confirmation expectations theory and captures customer satisfaction changes as a response to Norwegian Joy’s unexpected Chinese-market-withdrawal decision.•Methods-wise, this paper employs sentimental analysis of online comments to measure customer satisfaction. Statistically, the unexpectedness of the withdrawal decision allows us to use the difference-in-difference approach to clearly identify the source of customer satisfaction changes.•Statistics results lend support to the hypothesis that customer satisfaction would rise after the announcement of the withdrawal decision because Norwegian Joy's departure lowers customer expectations on their onboard experience.