Exploring the effectiveness of hotel management's responses to negative online comments

Abstract

The present study aims to identify the linguistic strategies and resources that characterize the review response genre, hotel management's responses addressing negative comments posted by dissatisfied customers on travel websites. It has been established that hotel management should proactively manage the hotel's online reputation by monitoring the online comments and by giving each of the negative ones an effective response. While the majority of the research has primarily explored the effectiveness of the genre from the analysts’ perspective, the present study approaches the issue from the customers’ perspective by collecting the dissatisfied customers’ views upon their reading of the hotel management's responses. The data comprises these responses downloaded directly from TripAdvisor and responses of a questionnaire survey administered to frequent travelers. Results suggest that effective responses and less effective responses differ in the use of moves and metadiscourse, the two linguistic resources hotel management uses in their attempt at achieving respectively rapport management and persuasion.