‘We are open again (and again)’: communicating during COVID-19–opportunities, challenges, and lessons learned

Abstract

During any crisis, how a company communicates will determine how much reputational capital is spent and how quickly the company can recover. Extending the Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) to hotel websites and social media, this paper investigates Swiss hotels’ messages during this crisis to repair their image, bolster their reputation, and attract customers back to Swiss destinations. From June 2020 to August 2021, messages from Swiss independent 4- and 5-star hotels were mined, and semantic network analysis, sentiment analysis, and an analysis of SCCT strategies were employed to investigate hoteliers’ messages during the pandemic. Hoteliers adopted different strategies between hotel website (dominated by corrective action) and social media (renewal). Hoteliers tried to create positive emotions as detected through sentiment analysis and the wide use of exclamation points. Guest was the most popular theme and concept from the semantic analysis. The emphasis on guests and positive emotion indicates the humanness of the communicated message.