Listen to Your Customers! How Hotels Manage Online Travel Reviews. The Case of Hotels in Lugano

Given the increasing influence of online hotel reviews on travellers’ decisions, hotels need to develop management strategies, in order to monitor their business’ online reputation and to take advantage of customers’ comments. In the paper, the communicative practices taking place in the online interaction between guests and hotels are analysed, in order to pursue a descriptive goal—that is to characterize the phenomenon, and a prescriptive goal—that is to provide guidelines and a framework to develop strategies to effectively reply to online customers’ reviews. Three kinds of analyses were performed on a sample of online reviews and the respective hotel responses: (1) a typology of the online interaction guest-hotel was elaborated and validated; (2) the arguments used by reviewers to support their recommendation were identified, to verify if and to what extent hotels address them; (3) rhetorical moves (i.e. communicative strategies used by a speaker to persuade the audience) employed by hotels to appeal to their customers were classified.