Image Repair or Self-Destruction? A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of Restaurants’ Responses to Online Reviews

Customers are today becoming more and more reliant on online travel reviews for their buying decisions, such as where to stay on holiday or where to have dinner in a foreign town. In particular, TripAdvisor has become a first stop for travel planning. People are increasingly engaging in electronic word-of-mouth (Pollach 2006), thus potentially influencing a business’ economic performance. Firms cannot generally get negative reviews changed or removed, but the website grants a ‘right to reply’ function where owners can respond to criticism or thank customers for the compliments obtained (TripAdvisor 2014). The present study calls into question the way restaurants are exploiting this medium, taking the opportunity to learn from the experiences of their customers or, instead, trying to discredit the reliability of the feedback received. Complaint response represents a critical part of a business’ customer relationship management, being responsiveness, compensation and contact highly valued by customers (Avant 2013). The paper aims at investigating the owners’ replies to negative comments in UK and Italy. Our corpus collects a set of low score reviews left on TripAdvisor website for restaurants situated in the two countries. Zhang and Vásquez’s (2014) analysis of the generic structure of hotel responses to customer complaints represents a practical reference to classify the moves enacted in the texts. Our study investigates the argumentations exploited by managers and owners to try to defend and rebuild trust and reputation, letting diners know that their opinions matter or, instead, imposing the firm’s contrasting — and sometimes angry — point of view. Corpus-assisted discourse analysis (Baker 2006) constitutes a useful framework to help spot the characteristics typifying the owners’ attitudes towards criticism in the two different cultural contexts, by means of the interpretation of tendencies and discursive patterns.