Preliminary communication
https://doi.org/10.20867/thm.24.1.10
Comment And Comment Response Strategies - An Analysis Of Gay Hotel Guests’ Comments And Managers’ Responses
Bình Nghiêm-Phú
orcid.org/0000-0002-4828-4140
; National Institute of Technology – Fukushima College, Japan
Abstract
Purpose – This study explores the strategies that hotel customers and managers/representatives use to complain/compliment and respond to complaints/compliments.
Design – The study employed both the customer- and manager-+ generated contents posted on an online travel community as its data.
Methodology – The study involved two gay oriented hotels of the Axel Corporation. The data were deductively analysed to understand the discourse strategies underlying Axel hotel customers’ complaints/compliments and managers/representatives’ complaint/compliment responses.
Findings – The outcome suggests that Axel hotel guests’ online written compliments and complaints are nearly the perfect reflections of their spoken acts. Together the online hotel guest community can potentially form a powerful market force. Axel hotel managers/representatives, although trying to actively manage guest comments, seem to lag behind in terms of both linguistics and managerial strategies.
Originality of the research – Previous studies have examined what customers complain and compliment about, but have neglected the topic of how customers complain and compliment. They have also overlooked the topic of how business managers/representatives respond to customer complaints and compliments. Moreover, no composite attempt has been made to simultaneously investigate these issues using the approaches of both business and linguistics researchers. These theoretical gaps were addressed in this study.
Keywords
(dis)satisfaction; hotel attributes; comment/response strategies; content analysis; English
Hrčak ID:
200246
URI
Publication date:
28.5.2018.
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