Business Responses to Positive Reviews in Arabic: A Move Analysis on Booking.com

This study aims to identify the moves used by hotel managers in responding to positive reviews shared by satisfied customers on Booking.com in Saudi Arabia. Most of the previous studies explored the hotel responses to the negative reviews of the dissatisfied customers because the higher impact they have on the image, reputation, and booking rates. Hotel responses to positive reviews have received less attention, especially Arabic. It has been investigated in terms the speech act of compliment and compliment responses in different online platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram in non-business context. Therefore, this study was conducted to fill the gap. The data consist of 200 hotel responses to positive reviews that were collected from 96 hotels that are 5-star-hotels located in 18 cities in Saudi Arabia. The data were collected from Booking.com and analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively, using the framework of move analysis. The results found that twelve moves were employed by the hotel managers at the beginning, middle, and end, which were classified as major and minor moves. In addition, the use of ‘opening pleasantries’, ‘thanking/expressing appreciation’, ‘solicit future visit’, and ‘closing pleasantries’ were the most frequent moves. The move of ‘thanking/expressing appreciation’ was used for different reasons and showed interesting linguistic realization and intensification strategies, such as expressive punctuation, modifiers, using one or more than one adjective, and using thank move twice or more in the same response. However, using the adverb ‘very much’ was the most frequent one. Addressing the customer by using the first person plural pronoun ‘we’ was frequently used in ‘thanking/expressing appreciation’, ‘soliciting future visit’, ‘closing pleasantries’, ‘apology’, and ‘invite direct contact’ that emphasize the corporate identity over the personal identity. Finally, the frequent use for ‘opening pleasantries’ and ‘closing pleasantries’ reflect formality in writing style in response to guests’ positive reviews on Booking.com and the competence of hotel management in online business discourse.