Exploring the Politeness Experience of Intelligent Customer Service on Travel E‑commerce Platforms from a Sustainability Perspective

In the context of rapid digital economic growth, travel e commerce platforms have become essential to modern tourism, and their sustainability depends not only on economic performance but also on social trust and environmental responsibility. Existing studies focus mainly on platforms’ social and environmental impacts and rarely examine operational sustainability, especially intelligent customer service as a key user touchpoint. This study examines customer experience to analyze how negative interactions with intelligent customer service affect platform sustainability. Using the critical incident technique (CIT), 347 dissatisfied service incidents were collected and analyzed, revealing six core problems. User complaints concentrate on inadequate problem solving and poor handovers to human agents, causing transaction loss and higher operating costs that harm economic sustainability, eroding trust and widening the digital divide that threaten social sustainability, and increasing digital carbon footprints while missing opportunities to promote green consumption, constraining environmental sustainability. The study links microservice failures to macro sustainability and proposes a multi level collaborative governance framework for practice and theory.