The formation of the image of top-ranked hotels through real online customer reviews: a corpus-based study of evaluative adjectives as image-formers/providers

摘要

This study is grounded on a corpus-based analysis of evaluative adjectives as hotel image-formers/providersconducted from a multifaceted yet complementary perspective which departs from the notion of destinationimage formation (Gartner, 1993; Baloglu & McCleary, 1999, Gylling, 2004 among others) focused on a specificaspect, that of the hotel of destination, and to a specific genre, the online (hotel) customer review. The corpus ofstudy, which contains more than 250 000 words, is made up of more than 1200 online reviews of top-rankedhotels retrieved from the popular website Tripadvisor.com. WordSmith Tools 5.0 was used to analyse andcategorise the evaluative adjectives in the corpus from three perspectives: firstly, adjectives were initiallyclassified according to frequency and/or saliency criteria; secondly, in terms of their implicit degree ofpositivity/negativity; and thirdly, according to the kind of evaluation provided. Subsequently, the main featuresevaluated in any hotel online customer review (value, rooms, location, cleanliness, and service) and theirfrequently associated adjectival evaluative acts were analysed to determine their collocational behavior and thusthe way such appraisal patterns contribute to “destination image formation”, that is, to form an impression onspecific aspects of top-ranked hotels. The paper is aimed at showing that evaluative adjectives in online customerreviews are critical in the interpretation of subjective expected values, and that a correct understanding of thekind of image they transmit in the tourist-to tourist digital interaction through reviews provides an opportunityfor destination marketers, in this case hoteliers, to enhance the psychological and symbolic values as well as thebenefits of the destination according to improved communication strategies and language usage.