Avoiding negative word of mouth would be of vital importance for promoting sustainable rural tourism. By searching for the channels influencing the effect of residents’ irregular business behaviours (RIBB) on negative word of mouth (NWOM) in rural tourism destinations, incorporating how to moderate such effect, this study found that RIBB would affect NWOM via tourists’ anger emotions (TAE) or tourists’ regret emotions (TRE). Additionally, destination attractiveness positively moderates the effect of RIBB on either TAE or TRE, indicating that tourists with a high perceived destination attraction might not mitigate TAE or TRE, which might go against the saying of ‘Love me, love my dog’. This study thus argued that destination attractiveness would not mitigate the effect of RIBB on either TAE or TRE, thereby deteriorating NWOM, which would be an essential finding that may contribute to the existing literature by either shedding new light on the important and special role of destination attractiveness or providing an alternative explanation based on the emotion-appraisal theory.
