English Language Proficiency and Tourist Trust in Saudi Arabian Hotels: The Mediating Role of Communication Clarity

Abstract

Hotel guests routinely make consequential decisions on the basis of short conversations with employees. They disclose personal information, accept payment conditions, rely on directions, report security concerns, and trust staff to resolve failures in an unfamiliar environment. In Saudi Arabia's increasingly international hotel market, many of these encounters occur in English. This article develops a conceptual model explaining how employees' English proficiency may contribute to tourist trust through communication clarity. It distinguishes cognitive trust, grounded in perceptions of ability and reliability, from affective trust, grounded in perceived care and benevolence. The article argues that English proficiency influences cognitive trust when it enables employees to understand requests, provide accurate explanations, confirm commitments, and communicate uncertainty responsibly. It influences affective trust when pragmatic and interactional competence allow employees to listen without impatience, acknowledge inconvenience, and adapt communication to the guest. Communication clarity is proposed as the principal mediator, while service-recovery quality, role visibility, encounter risk, guest language proficiency, and hotel communication systems operate as contingencies. The model rejects accent-based or native-speaker definitions of competence and treats functional intelligibility, listening, occupational vocabulary, pragmatic appropriateness, and repair as the relevant dimensions. A multi-source research design is proposed using role-based language assessment, guest surveys, observed encounters, and follow-up measures of promise fulfilment. The article concludes that hotels should not treat English training as a cosmetic hospitality skill. It is part of risk management and relationship building, but it creates trust only when clear language is matched by correct information, operational authority, and reliable follow-through.