Positioned within intercultural pragmatics, particularly the salience theory of the Socio-cognitive Approach (SCA) proposed and developed by Kecskes (2008, 2013, 2017, and 2019), this article explores the role of metapragmatic expressions (MPEs) in salience adjusting in complaint responses in the context of intercultural phone interactions. Drawing on data from 42 recordings of English phone interactions between English speaking customers and Chinese agents of a complaint center of one Chinese airline, MPEs used in the interactions are analyzed to address two research questions: 1) What types of MPEs are used by the agents and customers in complaint responses? 2) How are these MPEs used to adjust salience in complaint responses to facilitate complaint settlement? Data analysis reveals that, faced with institutional, linguistic, and sociocultural constraints, the speakers mainly employ five types of MPEs to adjust the emergent situational salience of relevant information or knowledge, including business rules and regulations, language use, social-cultural knowledge, and emotional states. In salience adjusting, the agents tend to be information-oriented and institutionalized whereas the customers tend to be both emotion- and information-oriented, but highly personalized. The findings shed light on intercultural pragmatics and customer service training in business communication.