Las reseñas de TripAdvisor: ¿un nuevo género de discurso turístico?

In this paper we present the results of a descriptive-interpretative analysis of some reviews about Spanish hotels and restaurants published on one of the most prominent travel review sites, TripAdvisor. The aim of the study is to examine linguistic common features that appear in guests’ opinions and hotel responses. In the same time, we try to emphasize the most important features of a review in order to find out if it can be considered part of tourist discourse and, if so, to generate a new specialized form of communication. Qualitative data from corpora denote that TripAdvisor reviews fulfil the typical functions of tourist discourse (informative, prescriptive and persuasive), with a special prominence of the last one. In addition, the tourist review seems to be the ideal framework to underline the most common pragmalinguistics strategies to describe and to advice the users’ tourist experience.