Building trust through transparency

A cross-cultural study of restaurant responses to customer complaints

Abstract

This study examines how restaurants in three English-speaking countries—the United Kingdom, the United States, and Australia—deploy transparency to rebuild trust when responding publicly to 1-star Google Reviews. Guided by Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and Hall’s context-communication framework, the Global Restaurant Response Corpus (GRRC) was assembled: 1,500 manager replies (500 per country; 657,750 tokens) posted in 2024–2025 by venues rated 4 stars or higher. Using corpus-assisted discourse analysis, lexical and discourse patterns that signal transparency (e.g., “explain”, “because”, “reason”) and trust (e.g., “honest”, “ensure”, “acknowledge”) were analysed and compared. Quantitative keyword and collocation tests revealed a shared four-move response template—apology, acknowledgment, justification, remediation—yet uncovered culturally inflected preferences: U.S. replies favored explicit justifications and empathic tone; U.K. replies foregrounded restrained professionalism; Australian replies blended directness with conversational warmth. These findings suggest that while a global norm of “visible accountability” is emerging in digital complaint management, its rhetorical realization remains tuned to local communication styles. The study advances understanding of transparency as a culturally mediated trust-building strategy and offers practical guidance for hospitality professionals crafting responses in an increasingly transparent marketplace.