Hospitality Students’ Pragmatic Competence in Apology

When dealing with guests’ complaints using English language, hospitality frontliners at hotels in Indonesia will also rely on their pragmatic competence to satisfy the guests. This research is aimed analyzing strategies used by students handling especially terms of apologizing and whether there a significant difference between those part-time job experience without experience. The study utilized quantitative method collecting responses (n =22) Written Discourse Completion Task (WDCT). Using categorization apology (Cohen, 1986), results show that most frequently are expressing offering repairs. Other such as admitting responsibility explaining much less frequently, while promise forbearance was never used. Furthermore, after performing t-test, 13 participants who took jobs (M = 1.76, SD 0.25) compared nine control group 1.38, 0.33) demonstrated significantly better for complaints, t(14) 2.87, p .01.