Communicating Goals: A Corpus-Assisted Analysis of Hotel Descriptions Presented on Online Travel Agency Agoda

Abstract

The ultimate goal of the study was to investigate word choices of 4 and 5-star hotels that were advertised on the Online Travel Agency (OTA) Agoda. A total of 97 hotel overviews on the OTA Agoda were downloaded, prepared and examined using the corpus linguistics software, AntConc 3.5.8 (Anthony, 2019). The findings revealed 81 keywords with log likelihood values of at least 100 which are dominated by keywords relating to amenities, facilities and services (f=35; 43.21%), setting (f=24; 29.63%), and words relating to characteristic features of amenities, facilities and services (f=17; 20.99%), visitors (f=4; 4.94%) and involved production of language (f=1; 1.23%). These keywords depict that main role of the overviews on OTAs, i.e., to provide positively valued information about the services, amenities and facilities of the advertised hotels. Pedagogical implications of the study in the field of English for Specific Purposes as well as its methodological implications on the use of corpus-assisted analysis in the investigation of big data harnessed online were drawn.