A Pragmatic Study Of Hotel Management's Responses To Customers' Online Complaints

E-tourism has become an accepted trend nowadays.This thesis will study the hotel management's responses to online complaints from the perspective of pragmatics.There have been a large number of studies carried out on complaints,yet how complaints are responded in the online setting seems to have long been neglected.Thus,this thesis will study complaint responses by focusing on data collected in online commercial setting.The purpose of this study is aimed to conclude the response strategies and their pragmatic functions.This study is a qualitative one based on data excerpted from a travel website called TripAdvisor,where complaint reviews and their responses from ten 3-star hotels are selected.On the basis of Spencer-Oatey's Rapport Management Theory,three questions will be discussed:(1)What are the hotel management's response strategies for customers' online complaints?(2)How do these response strategies in combination form various response patterns?(3)What pragmatic functions do these responses have on interpersonal relationship under the theory of rapport management?Based on the orientations influencing strategy using,response strategies can be divided into two general strategies,including conflicting response strategy and mitigating response strategy,which can be further classified into respective six sub-strategies.That is to say,the mitigating response strategy can be divided into acknowledgement,explanation,apology,rectify problems,express feelings,and appreciation;the conflicting response strategy can be divided into challenge customers' decisions,rebut,excuse,suggest or recommend,justification and self-promotion.After analyzing the data,the author finds there exists a rule that the hotel management always choose the combination of several response strategies together as a single response.The combination can be concluded as three patterns: conflicting strategies plus conflictingstrategies,mitigating strategies plus mitigating strategies,and mitigating strategies plus conflicting strategies.A further study is given on what pragmatic functions of these response strategies have.It is indicated that the mitigating strategy has constructive functions which enhance the rapport.The pragmatic functions of conflicting strategy can be either positive or negative,that is to say it can enhance the rapport as well as reduce it.