Over rituelen en routines in opening en afsluiting van service encounters in toerismekantoren in Nederland en Vlaanderen

Abstract

On rituals and routines in the opening and closing of service encounters in tourism offices in the Netherlands and FlandersThis paper brings a cross-cultural analysis of opening and closing rituals and routines in Dutch and Flemish tourist offices, from a Politeness Theory perspective. On the basis of a corpus of 200 interactions it reveals, apart from some general comparable tendencies, quite different communicative habits in both neighbouring regions. The differences point in the direction of more formal institutional interactions in the Flemish tourist offices in comparison with the Dutch interactions. More specifically, Dutch interactions appear to be less formal, show a higher level of freedom with respect to the organisation of the opening and closing sequences and attach more importance to the relational work between the speech participants.

Openings and closings in tourist offices in Belgium, France and the Netherlands.

“…commercial interactions), we found quite important differences between the four regions. Before reflecting on the limitations of this research, we would like to briefly position the conclusions of the present paper based on data of four regions against the conclusions of a previous study, which was limited to Dutch and Flemish tourist offices (Tobback & Van den Heede 2019). In relation to openings, the current data overall confirm the main conclusions of the previous paper: Flemish participants show to be more taciturn and, related to this, openings show to be more strictly organised than in the Dutch tourist offices.…”

“…Márquez-Reiter & Placencia 2004). With respect to Belgian and Dutch service encounters, hardly any systematic research on service encounters has been undertaken yet (see Tobback & Van den Heede 2019). Danblon et al (2005), however, refer to the impression voiced by foreign visitors that politeness markers and, especially, expressions such as 'please' and 'thank you' are used very frequently in Belgian service encounters.…”