Giving offense and making amends: How hotel management attempts to manage rapport with dissatisfied customers

•The review response genre always contained both the Deny Problem move and the Manage Rapport move.•The Deny Problem move could be realized explicitly or implicitly.•Rapport was enhanced by managing the reviewers' goals, sociality rights, and face wants.

Information about the quality of the accommodation services provided by hotels in different cities across the globe can now be conveniently obtained by accessing travelers' reviews posted on various travel websites such as TripAdvisor, Orbitz, and Expedia. These reviews, especially negative ones, can have serious impact on the hotels concerned whose reputation and business are at stake. Hotel management thus needs to address negative comments with an effective response, termed review response genre in this study, to achieve service recovery. Drawing upon the construct of rapport as the analytical framework, this paper focuses particularly on the ways the review response genre serves this communicative purpose while responding to unjust negative comments. It is found that hotel management deals with such comments with denials of the problems mentioned in the comments and attempts to enhance rapport with the dissatisfied customers. The findings should be of practical significance to hotels and the practitioners responsible for writing review responses.