Use of language strategies for hotel website evaluation in China

Abstract

With the advancement of information technology, people tend to get information online and to shop online. This trend has also been spread to hotel booking, implying the critically importance on improving the application of information technology in hospitality. Therefore, to timely present the hotel image and attract customers worldwide, the establishment of hotels' own websites has been widely adopted by hoteliers to enhance the competitiveness of a hotel in the current fierce global market. China, among the world's fastest growing economies, is promoting the development of her tourism industry earnestly, because tourism is always regarded as a relatively eco-friendly and promising industry. As an important section of a travel process, living and eating in a hotel plays a vital role not only in engaging visitors but also in forming a decent image towards a destination. Hence, enough attention should be given to hospitality, especially those high star hotels, in order to ensure the service quality and boost visitors' satisfaction. Numerous studies have been conducted in hospitality to evaluate the effectiveness of hotel websites in order to help hotels improve their service level, including mainly the evaluation of hotel website functionality and usability. One important attribute, the language, though has been pointed out by different scholars as a crucial section of a website, has not been explored fully yet. Thus, one important aim of the research is to bridge this gap. Based on the Appraisal Theory, which aims to reveal the hidden mechanism in building up interpersonal relationship, an analytical framework was proposed and was used for the subsequent coding and analysis for the language strategy used by five-star hotels of China on their websites. After a careful search and identification of the official hotel websites, all hotels' introductory texts were extracted to help construct a corpus for the presentation of the use of language strategies in hotel websites generally and the comparison between different types of hotels in terms of language strategies. The current profiles of five-star hotels in China, the status quo of English website construction, the genre of hotels' introduction in their websites, and the finalized coding scheme for the study were found out first, followed by the aforementioned analyses of the general language strategy and the respective preference in the use of the language strategy among hotels with different natures. Similarities and differences were both identified throughout the five-star hotels together with the reasons why these phenomena are existent and the contrast of this study from the previous literature. Hence, both theoretical contributions and the managerial implications are generated based on what have been found and discussed. It is hoped that this study can enrich the theoretical development of Appraisal Theory in tourism and hospitality, and enhance the hotel website quality from the language strategy perspective.