A Comparative Genre Analysis of Hotels’ Responses to Negative Reviews

Managing Virtual Rapport on TripAdvisor: Discourse in Hotel Responses to Negative Online Reviews

“…Townsend and Wallace (2016) This study applies the use in research approach of Herring's (2004) CMDA. The move structures of main moves and sub-moves in the 72 responses were coded with NVivo 12 into the coding schemes of move analysis according to the hotel star rating using adapted move structures from past studies (Ho, 2017a;Thumvichit & Gampper, 2018), as shown in the table below. The analysis identified six main moves in responses to negative reviews: opening, acknowledging feedback, dealing with complaints, positioning hotel brand, concluding and closing.…”

“…According to Henry and Roseberry (1998), obligatory moves in a genre are necessary to attain the communicative purpose of the genre, whereas optional moves are not mandatory and can be optionally employed by speakers or writers to enable effective communication. Thumvichit (2017) stated that an obligatory move is an integral part of a text to achieve the communicative goal.…”

“…There is a paucity of research on hotel responses in Southeast Asia, hotel responses to negative reviews in Malaysia from the discourse perspective remain under-explored. To date, Thailand is the only Southeast Asian country where studies on hotel responses have clearly been conducted (Panseeta & Todd, 2014;Thumvichit, 2017;Thumvichit & Gampper, 2018;Thumvichit & Gampper, 2019). Thumvichit (2017) as well as Thumvichit and Gampper (2018) compare the move structures and linguistic features in hotel responses to negative reviews between hotels in Thailand and England from a cross linguistic perspective.…”

Expressive illocutionary acts and politeness in managerial responses to online hotel reviews

“…Easily lending themselves to linguistic analyses, Tripadvisor reviews and responses have become a very inspirational field of language study discussed within different theoretical and methodological frameworks (genre theory (Cenni and Goethals, 2020;Napolitano, 2018;Thumvichit, 2016;Zhang & Vásquez, 2014), speech act theory (Guzzo & Gallo, 2019;Hopkinson, 2017), interpersonality framework (Suau Jiménez, 2017)). Given the spread of the English language as a lingua franca in the field of travel and tourism (see Crystal, 2003), research activity has largely centred on English texts.…”

“…While negative reviews have caught significant attention, the reviews displaying positive polarity remain largely understudied (Cenni & Goethals, 2020). Likewise, the research on managerial responses to positive reviews (e.g., Thumvichit, 2016) significantly falls behind that on responses to the reviews expressing criticism and disapproval (e.g., Guzzo & Gallo, 2019;Ho, 2017;Hopkinson, 2017;Napolitano 2018;Zhang & Vásquez, 2014). Since negative reviews may have detrimental effects on a hotel's operation (Levy et.…”