If nearly all Airbnb reviews are positive, does that make them meaningless?

Peer-to-peer business models rely on interpersonal communication for their success. In this article, we focus on Airbnb – an exemplar of the so-called ‘sharing economy’ – and more specifically, on Airbnb’s reciprocal reviewing system, which enables both hosts and guests to review one another. Our study takes a computer-assisted, qualitative approach to explore linguistic patterns of evaluation in Airbnb reviews. Our findings indicate that Airbnb reviews tend to comprise a very restricted set of linguistic resources, establishing the site’s norm of highly positive commentary, which in turn makes Airbnb reviews, on the surface, appear to be quite similar to one another. However, a micro-analytic comparison of positive reviews reveals that less-than-positive experiences are sometimes communicated using more nuanced, subtle cues. This study contributes to existing literature on electronic word of mouth in the tourism industry by highlighting how evaluation is communicated, while simultaneously responding to hospitality scholars’ calls for analyses which extend beyond the star ratings and also take into account consumers’ constructions of experience in the review texts themselves.