In recent years, travellers have increasingly opted for sharing economy businesses, such as Airbnb. In contrast to
other platforms for travellers, the Airbnb review system is characterised by its positivity bias, which implies that most of the
users post enthusiastically positive reviews. Posting a negative review is the exception, which makes it a highly sensitive task
in relational terms.
In light of the above, this study aims to examine 60 reviews with negative valence in order to understand: first,
which aspects of the experience make airbnbers feel dissatisfied; second, the extent to which relational concerns
and authenticity make an impact on both dissatisfaction and rapport orientation; and third, how rapport concerns (i.e., face and
rights and obligations) are managed in reviews with negative valence. The results show that a large number of users tried to
repair rapport, while others neglected or challenged rapport. The difference in tone and intention was motivated by the
presence/absence of the relational component (i.e., association rights), which had an impact on the varying importance given to
other faults. The present study intends to bring to the fore the importance of rapport management when posting sensitive
information in an online system in which the management of communicative skills lies at its core.
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Cited by
Cited by 4 other publications
Cenni, Irene
2024. Sharing travel experiences on TripAdvisor: A genre analysis of negative hotel reviews written in French, Spanish and Italian. Journal of Pragmatics 221 ► pp. 76 ff.
2023. The impact of linguistic choices and (para-)linguistic markers on the perception of Twitter complaints by other customers: an experimental approach. Journal of Politeness Research 19:1 ► pp. 87 ff.
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