Language of Online Reviews for the Digital Promotion of Madura Tourism Destinations

This article deals with the language used in online reviews by the people visiting the tourist attractions in Madura, particularly the beaches of Madura Island. These online reviews generally comprise of people's opinion and/or feedback on their overall experience of the place. Destinations such as Madura can widely benefit from such online reviews, if channelled in the right way. The reviews in large tourism websites such as Trip Advisor can be an effective medium of digital promotion. Accordingly, the data for this study were gathered from the Trip Advisor website (retrieved from: https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attractions-g1574414-Activities-c61-t52- Madura_Island_East_Java.html). The study attempted to uncover the language of the reviews used by the tourists visiting and experiencing the tourism destinations in Madura Island. Using the analysis of appraisal proposed by Martin and White (The Language of Evaluation. Appraisal in English, 2005), positive and negative reviews of the beaches in Madura Island were evaluated intended to provide inputs and suggestions on the resources, properties, and other complementary facilities as part of Madura tourism promotion. Keywords: appraisal, online review, digital promotion, Madura, tourism comment on the resource, properties, and other complementary facilitie