From trust to trustworthiness: Formalising consumer behaviour with discourse on Airbnb platform

One of the most important consumers’ needs in their decision-making process is reduction of risks. On online platforms, trust is the most powerful tool for mitigating risks in making consumption decisions, especially in relation to tourism services that customers are unable to experience before the trip. In the digital age, trust is often mediated by information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as rating and reviewing systems, devices that collect and process data, communication tools. Although trust is built by consumers and providers that use the platform, it needs to be formalised by the intermediary - the platform - through legal policies, terms and conditions of use. In fact, while these legal documents contribute to creating trust in the platform’s services, they also formalise consumption practices that emerge from consumers’ and providers’ interactions on the platform. However, research shows that consumers rarely read policy documents, making it necessary to make them visible on the platform during the customer’s journey. The present chapter investigates the discursive strategies that are used to formalise consumption practices in policies of the Airbnb platform. The analysis shows how the platform creates an ideal ‘trustworthy’ consumer through its discursive work in official documents by providing formal indicators of what consumer behaviours make a user worthy of trust. The analysis also shows how the platform carefully balances justifications of its role as rule maker and enforcer with its role of neutral intermediator, which has an ethos of sharing and hospitality.