Sharing travel experiences on TripAdvisor: A genre analysis of negative hotel reviews written in French, Spanish and Italian

Abstract

The advent of the Web 2.0 brought about a significant transformation in the tourist experience and in its modes of communication. One of the prevailing genres in today's digital tourism discourse is represented by online reviews, produced and consumed daily by millions of users on global platforms such as TripAdvisor, Booking.com or Airbnb. Online tourist reviews are mainly used to share a personal (travel) experience with service providers and fellow travelers, at the same time they offer an evaluation of tourism services.The aim of the present case study is to provide an in-depth investigation of how tourists are sharing their post-trip experiences online from a linguistic and pragmatic standpoint. Specifically, we focused on negative hotel reviews posted on TripAdvisor and we adopted a cross-linguistic perspective. Building on previous work, we now focused on a different set of languages, considering reviews written in Spanish, Italian and French (N100 for each language, for a total of N300) posted between 1st of January 2021 and 31st December 2022. Ultimately, the aim was to verify whether users writing in different languages share their experiences adopting uniform linguistic norms and communicative habits or display different discursive preferences. In order to reach this goal, we analyzed not only which topics tourists include in their reviews, but also which communicative moves they adopted to share their experiences and opinions. Results indicate a tendency towards a cross-linguistic similarity. This finding seems to point toward a potential standardization process of how travel experiences are shared online in different languages, within the highly popular genre of online reviews.