Wong, IpKin Anthony and Ou, Juanjuan and Wilson, Andrew (2020) Evolution of hoteliers' organizational crisis communication in the time of mega disruption. Tourism Management, 84: 104257. ISSN 0261-5177
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Abstract
This research note explores the evolutionary process of corporate crisis communication to understand how international hotel enterprises respond to the COVID-19 crisis. Corpus linguistics was used as a computer-aided approach in assessing a large collection of naturally occurring texts. Press releases from hotel corporations listed in Fortune 500 within the period of January to March 2020 were curated and built into three corpora. Lexical patterns that evolved over the course of the first quarter of 2020 reveal that the lodging industry did not fully prepare for the crisis until March, while management was still dwelling on their past achievements even in February 2020. The overall tone, pre-crisis, reflected top management's demonstration of success and performance, attributed to the CEOs themselves; while it completely changed during the crisis. This study draws upon crisis management and organizational communication streams of work to advance prevailing theoretical accounts of organizational crisis communication.