Negative guest reviews and hotel responses on Booking.com: A cross-linguistic analysis of the Austrian, British, and Ukrainian luxury hotel sector.

The rise of online travel booking platforms such as Hotels.com, Expedia, Agoda, Trip.com, TripAdvisor, and Booking.com, among others, has significantly simplified the process for guests to share their hotel experiences, including providing feedback to hotel management. Negative feedback, particularly in the form of negative reviews, has attracted considerable research interest across various fields—including information sciences, marketing, economics, tourism, and linguistics—due to its potential to harm customer loyalty and damage business reputation. This PhD project acknowledges the critical role of negative review management (service recovery) in the hotel industry and investigates the online interactions between 5-star hotels in Austria, Ukraine, and the UK, and their guests on the Booking.com platform. By adopting a cross-linguistic perspective and utilizing a qualitative genre analysis approach, this research examines the structure of guest reviews and hotel responses while identifying variations in review and response strategies across the different languages. Ultimately, this project seeks to contribute to the fields of digital tourism discourse and hospitality management by refining the taxonomy of review and response genres and providing communication guidelines for hotel management.