Hotel Responses in Arabic to Negative Reviews on TripAdvisor

The present study has sought to bridge a gap of research on online hotel responses in Arabic to negative reviews in the business context from the perspective of discourse analysis. The study identified the structural generic concept of moves found in Arabic responses to negative reviews posted by dissatisfied customers on TripAdvisor. Responses were collected from 5-star hotels located in six popular regional destinations in Saudi Arabia. The corpus comprised 252 responses written in Arabic and included 41 hotels. Responses were manually collected and analyzed using Microsoft Excel. The results showed that there was a total of 23 moves used by hotel managers in response to negative reviews on TripAdvisor. The use of opening pleasantries/greetings and expressing gratitude were the most frequent moves, followed by closing pleasantries, visit invitation, proving action, and apologizing, respectively. The most common moves were used to support the relationship between hotel managers and customers. In addition, the personal pronoun ‘we’ was used more frequently than ‘I’ to refer to the corporate identity when addressing the customers, expressing gratitude, inviting for a visit, apologizing, and so forth. These results can be used in preparing workshops and training courses to enhance the efficiency of language use for hotel managers when responding to dissatisfied customers by using the moves that support the relationship and avoid the others that damage it.