ABSTRACT
Building on previous research on hotel interactions (Fernández-Amaya, Hernández-López, & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2014), this study examines the politeness perceptions of 100 Spanish guests (50 men and 50 women) who have stayed at different hotels in Spain. The aim is to understand whether there is gender variation in guests’ expectations of appropriate communicative behavior at hotel reception desks. To this end, the participants completed a questionnaire on the importance given to certain communicative routines in the aforementioned context. The purpose of this questionnaire was to ascertain (1) participants’ expectations in relation to the receptionists’ language and implicit politeness orientations toward either solidarity or deference, and (2) participants’ alignment toward the transactional or relational aspects of the service encounter. The findings reveal that, while there are some gender differences in terms of language preferences and expectations, what seems to constrain participants’ expectations concerning degrees of (in)formality and solidarity/deference is the particular (sub)genre under analysis, that is, hotel reception-desk interaction.
