Marketing research has shown that customer relationship management can reduce the consequences of service failure. But the question is for how long an instance of Customer Engagement (CE) may influence a current critical incident, such as whether and how company–customer interactions during childhood may continue to influence the effects of service failure. Papen et al. (2020) posit that engagement with a company during childhood (childhood engagement) can affect subsequent perceptions of the relationship. Through an experiment with 152 participants, their study reveals that perceived controllability and childhood engagement moderate the effect of disappointment on repurchase intention. Customers with childhood engagement evaluate a service failure more favorably than customers without such experiences. Furthermore, customers are likely to react negatively if the company was deemed responsible for the failure. Accordingly, from a managerial perspective, childhood engagement and credible communication can prevent the dissolution of a customer relationship after service failure. This special issue covers several important topics in CE in the hospitality and tourism domain. The results of these studies provide significant theoretical and practical implications for the industry. We sincerely hope readers will find this special issue informative and useful. More important, we hope that this issue offers some directions for future scholarly inquiry into CE’s nature, dynamics, and evolution.