MOVE AND WRITING STRATEGY ANALYSIS OF INTERNATIONAL HOTEL HOMEPAGES

Abstract

Thailand is one of the most visited tourist destinations in the world. Hotel is one of the factors in decision making process when tourists select their travel destinations. Thailand offers a wide range of accommodation for every type of budget. Therefore, the hospitality industry in Thailand is highly competitive. It is important for hoteliers to advertise their places effectively in order to increase the hotel brand awareness and the number of hotel bookings. Particularly, the target customers of hotel in general are not only limited to domestic travelers but also international. Advertising through the hotel official websites helps reach the target audience from all over the world, so organizing the content on the website plays an important role in making the advertising effective. This paper therefore aims to analyze the moves and their structure in the content area of popular international hotel homepages and also the writing strategies used in each move. Twenty four hotel homepages from eight different countries were selected for the analysis. The generic structure of advertisement proposed by van der Vliet & Redeker (2014) was used as the analysis framework. The main results show that there are differences between moves found in the present study and van der Vliet & Redeker (2014)’s work. Additionally, there is a variety of writing strategies found in each move that help deliver its common communicative purposes.