Table 4. Politeness indicators in hotel reviews and responses. Number of appearances and [ratio of appearances per review] hotel responses

Source: Prepared by the author

In our corpus, as can be seen in Table 4, there is significant variation between the reviews and the responses. Expressions of gratitude appear in both reviews and responses, although the proportion is higher in responses than in reviews. The repeated presence of this speech act reveals its importance as a politeness strategy in these interactions, since it refers to the expression of customer satisfaction with the services received, as well as the hotel’s consequent satisfaction for having managed to please the guest (see Example 14). It is, therefore, an interaction marking a reaction and reciprocal recognition following a positive experience occurring offline, and that is publicly shown online. On the other hand, the hotels’ responses contain apologies to negative reviews and guest complaints, and which feature politeness formulas used by the company In order to offer guests verbal repair. In example (14), the hotel’s response formula is framed as gratitude following a greeting. Through this speech act, it recognises the importance of the comments made by guests, particularly if they are positive (nos gustaría agradecerle sus valoraciones tras su reciente visita a nuestro hotel, ‘we would like to thank you for your feedback after your recent visit to our hotel’) due to the impact they may have on the dissemination of its services, and therefore this speech act is the most used overall. The elaborate and formulaic nature of these speech acts, frequently spurred by complaints from users, have a complex, elaborate structure where companies intend to save face and protect corporate image (Márquez Reiter & Hidalgo Downing 2020, Hidalgo Downing , in preparation).

Lastly, we studied the typographical symbols, spelling and punctuation marks of the hotel reviews and responses. The relaxation of this type of marks constitutes a characteristic feature of CMT, according to numerous studies (Yus, 2011; Herring et.al., 2013; Cantamutto, 2017; Mancera Rueda, 2016). Internet writers use different resources in CMT that refer to the mode or channel (Halliday, 1985), since they entail mechanisms of adaptability to different technologies. Furthermore, as technology advances, there may be important differences between computer-mediated communication and the use of mobile devices (Gianmateo, Gubitosi and Parini, 2017). The latter allow for faster and more immediate writing, with less planning. Mobile devices sport predictive text features that often lead to typographical errors or misspelled words and may also lack punctuation marks. By contrast, computerised digital writing can more stably preserve the traits of traditional, normative writing. Undoubtedly, these differences can be clearly seen in hotels’ reviews and the responses. We computed a set of features that appear regularly in digital interactions in the two subsets of the corpus, although, as we will see, it is not a generalised phenomenon. These features include: abbreviations, spelling errors, typographical errors, expressive punctuation (use of several exclamation points or question marks or ellipsis); the use of capital letters to