Engagement in online hotel reviews: A comparative study

• Challenges deterministic influence of culture on writing in genres.
• Compares American and Chinese online hotel reviews, focusing on engagement.
• Finds American and Chinese reviews are similar in monogloss, contract and expand.
• Concludes language use is better explained by situatedness than by stereotyping.

This paper explores and compares American and Chinese travelers' engagement patterns in their online hotel reviews. Overall, the two populations display homogeneity across the engagement resources of monogloss and heterogloss, construing hotel review writing as primarily assertive and drastically constricted against alternative voices. The two populations' homogeneous engagement pattern suggests that their hotel review writing is not determined by their respective national cultures. Rather it has to do with the factors of introspectiveness, impersonality and asynchrony, and beneficial mutualism concerning travelers, potential travelers, hotel owners/managements, and travel websites. This paper thus demonstrates the strength of intercultural rhetoric's proposal of analyzing linguistic/rhetorical behaviors in particular contexts in terms of complexity and changeability.