Language of persuasion in ESP writing: Personal recount in travelers’ online complaints

Abstract

With an advanced improvement of Internet and digital communication technology, there is a trend of global travelers who narrate and evaluate their travel experience on online hotel review webpages after completing their journey. However, some hotel guests who receive dissatisfying service and disseminate negative word-of-mouth publicly have been a critical challenge for management groups. Despite the increasing importance, little linguistic attention has been paid on how international travelers communicate in the cyberspace to share their dissatisfying experience they had when staying in a particular hotel. The research purpose of the present study is to investigate the language of persuasion, in particular, family or personal recount, in these online complaints posted by international travelers who have stayed at 5-star luxury hotels in Hong Kong. The data are authentic hotel reviews collected from a public hotel review website TripAdvisor between 2012-2017. 40 sets of complex online complaints and response letters (approximately 20,000 words) from 12 hotels have been carefully selected and analyzed. The theoretical framework draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). Findings from selected texts are discussed to demonstrate, for example, social purpose, generic stages, mood choice, power status, affective involvement and lexico-grammatical features. The findings of this study hope to contribute examples for hotel managers and consultants to train their employees on how to develop effective responses to customer complaints. Keywords: online travelers’ complaints, recount