This article analyses the online discourse practices between customers and businesses of some 4-stars / 5-stars hotels. Online travel reviews are a specific genre built to address two audiences: from one side they address other travelers, and from the other side they address the customer service as in the traditional customer satisfaction surveys. Readers are directly addressed when the reviewer recommends or not the hotel; the staff and or the hotel are (in)directly addressed especially in complaints (see Vásquez 2014, Compagnone & Fiorentino 2018; Fiorentino & Compagnone 2019). Business replies are built for two audiences too. Hotel representatives reply to reviews directly addressing each single reviewer, sometimes naming him/her in the first line of the text (a text built as a traditional business letter). At the same time their reply is clearly built indirectly addressing the wider audience of new potential customers or old ones. The strategies and moves that businesses adopt in order to respond to online complaints have been already studied for Chinese in a genre/move analysis (Zhang & Vásquez 2014). Taking this study as a starting point, we extracted a corpus of about 100 online reviews followed by the businesses replies and we have extensively considered it in a ‘light’ quantitative approach and a more detailed qualitative approach. The focus is analysing online reviews as a way to manage disagreement between unsatisfied customers and hotels’ owners in order to protect the hotel reputation.

La gestione del disaccordo nelle recensioni online di hotel: un approccio conversazionale.

Fiorentino Giuliana
Primo
2020-01-01

Abstract

This article analyses the online discourse practices between customers and businesses of some 4-stars / 5-stars hotels. Online travel reviews are a specific genre built to address two audiences: from one side they address other travelers, and from the other side they address the customer service as in the traditional customer satisfaction surveys. Readers are directly addressed when the reviewer recommends or not the hotel; the staff and or the hotel are (in)directly addressed especially in complaints (see Vásquez 2014, Compagnone & Fiorentino 2018; Fiorentino & Compagnone 2019). Business replies are built for two audiences too. Hotel representatives reply to reviews directly addressing each single reviewer, sometimes naming him/her in the first line of the text (a text built as a traditional business letter). At the same time their reply is clearly built indirectly addressing the wider audience of new potential customers or old ones. The strategies and moves that businesses adopt in order to respond to online complaints have been already studied for Chinese in a genre/move analysis (Zhang & Vásquez 2014). Taking this study as a starting point, we extracted a corpus of about 100 online reviews followed by the businesses replies and we have extensively considered it in a ‘light’ quantitative approach and a more detailed qualitative approach. The focus is analysing online reviews as a way to manage disagreement between unsatisfied customers and hotels’ owners in order to protect the hotel reputation.
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/LCdM/issue/view/1592
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11695/96332
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