Hotels׳ responses to online reviews: Managing consumer dissatisfaction

• The study explains how some businesses are managing consumer dissatisfaction online.
• The authors examine the rhetorical moves of 80 hotel responses to online reviews.
• Online responses from businesses tend to be highly formulaic and conventionalized.
• Responses exhibit variation in degree of intertextual reference to original review.
• Responses also vary in emphasis on author’s corporate (versus personal) identities.

In this study we investigate the generic structure of hotel responses to customer complaints posted on popular travel website, TripAdvisor. Extending the genre analytic notion of rhetorical moves ( Swales, 1981 and Swales, 2004) to this computer-mediated text type, we analyzed 80 hotel replies that were posted in response to online consumer complaints. Our analysis of the responses of 4- and 5-star hotels located in 4 popular urban tourist destinations in China indicates that ten move types are commonly found in this genre, with eight of these appearing in the majority of reviews. These results suggest that online responses from businesses replying to user-generated reviews tend to be highly formulaic and conventionalized, with thanking and apologizing among the most common moves identified. However, we also found considerable variation with respect to how specific hotels were about addressing the problem(s) discussed in the original customer complaint, as well as the extent to which hotel management indicated having taken actions to correct those problems. Finally, our study found that in this set of responses, hotel personnel tended to emphasize a corporate (rather than personal) identity when constructing responses to complaints. The study׳s findings provide insights into some of the ways in which businesses are managing consumer dissatisfaction online.