Composing responses to negative hotel reviews: A genre analysis

Abstract

This study probes into the issue of how top hotels respond to customers’ complaints in public space by exploring their responses to negative reviews (RNRs) through the lens of discourse genre analysts with the aim to make concrete contributions to both English language teaching and service industries. This study examined a corpus of top UK hotels’ RNRs posted on TripAdvisor to address three research objectives: (1) to identify moves and steps of RNRs and their occurrence frequency, (2) to identify typicality of each move, and (3) to generate recurrent word combinations (RWCs) of each move and step. Covering all the communicative functions appeared in the corpus, six distinctive moves were identified along with several steps. As for the typicality, moves were categorized into three types: Obligatory, Conventional, and Optional moves. The lists of RWCs generated confirmed the identity of each move and step as each has its own distinctive list of combinations creating clear cuts between moves and steps. The brief guidelines for composing RNRs were then developed based on the findings of the three components.

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