What makes (im)politeness for travellers? Spanish tourists’ perceptions at national and international hotels

Although hotel service encounters have been widely studied, the literature presents two main shortcomings: 1) receptionist-guest communication has not received much attention from a politeness perspective; and 2) the scarcity of studies regarding politeness1 (i. e., the interlocutors’ perception of politeness) has been overshadowed by the vast amount of literature concerning politeness2. Regarding customer perception, understanding what appropriate communicative behaviour is - i. e. whether (non)verbal actions are conducive to variation in terms of customer perception and satisfaction - is crucial to understand service success or failure. In this context, our study examines the opinion and perception of 183 Spanish participants who had stayed at national and international hotels and who assessed, on the one hand, to what extent the receptionists were polite or impolite, and why; and on the other, how communication with customers could improve in terms of politeness. The findings indicate that, despite the participants’ general preference for friendliness and solidarity, the politeness strategies that participants valued as adequate in this context are not necessarily those traditionally related to Peninsular Spanish (i. e. directness and/or involvement). Also, this study shows that what lay people consider politeness encompasses a great number of variables in which linguistic production is but one of them.