What A TripAdvisor Corpus Can Tell Us About Culture

The rise of Travel 2.0 has produced significant changes in the way travellers plan their holidays and TripAdvisor has now become the world’s largest travel reviews website. These reviews represent the travellers’ voice and can be considered a valuable tourist text type since they reflect the travellers’ needs and values. This study aims to demonstrate that these values can be culturally aligned through a corpus-based analysis of the reviews. The data include two comparable corpora made up of reviews of accommodations in Puglia (Italy) written by English and Italian travellers. The texts contained in both corpora were subject to linguistic analysis by means of TextSTAT-2. The analysis carried out in this study is based on the methodology developed by Manca (2011), who proposes a combined quantitative and qualitative approach in corpus analysis, and on the methodology proposed by Tognini-Bonelli (2001) for the identification of functional correspondences across languages. The analysis of reviews shows that there are significant differences in the way English and Italian travellers perceive the holiday experience. These differences have particular linguistic outcomes, which concern mainly the length of reviews, the description of places and relational issues. The results obtained by linguistic enquiry are in line with Manca’s and are framed within Intercultural Studies. More specifically, they are interpreted in terms of Thinking Orientation (Walker et al. 2003, Katan 2004), Uncertainty Avoidance (Hofstede, 2001) and Affective Associations (Francesconi, 2007).