“It Is Always Disappointing to Receive Negative Feedback”: Attitudinal Stance in Managerial Responses to Negative Hotel Reviews

Effective responses to negative online customer reviews are seen as highly beneficial for influencing customer perceptions and protecting brand reputation. However, managers’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds may affect their linguistic choices. This study examines the markers of attitudinal stance in managerial responses, pointing to the range of rhetorical purposes associated with these forms, and comparing the ways in which managers of British and Serbian hotels exploit these devices. Tripadvisor responses from hotels located in the two countries were analysed drawing upon Biber’s approach (Biber et al. 1999). The results highlight the importance of attitudinal stance in achieving the overall communicative purpose of this genre. They also reveal that British hotel representatives use them slightly more frequently than Serbian hotel managers, which may be somewhat unexpected, and tend to show greater reliance on adjectives and verbs, while modals and adverbs are slightly more common in the responses from Serbian hotels.