“I wish we lived here; would be here every week!” – spatiality and mobility in the language of online travel reviews

Online travel reviews (OTRs) are an under-researched digital genre directly reflecting users’ geographical and digital mobility. Based on a corpus of hotel and restaurant reviews from Airbnb and Tripadvisor as well as a control corpus of reviews from a Lonely Planet travel guide, this paper analyzes the linguistic means used to construe spatiality and mobility in OTRs. The analysis reveals that linguistic descriptions of spatiality and mobility are central to OTRs. In addition to the linguistic strategies described in the literature, noun phrases referring to salient elements of the spatial scene frequently occur. Deictic projection is the norm, with the origo typically shifted to the reviewed establishment to convey involvement or highlight salient features. Subcorpus differences mirror thematic priorities: Tripadvisor reviews focus on food, drink, and service, whereas Airbnb reviews emphasize location. These emphases are reflected in the relative frequencies of noun phrases, deictics, and (non-deictic) static or dynamic spatial descriptions. These patterns show that OTRs have developed (sub)genre-specific linguistic conventions. More broadly, these findings suggest that OTRs function not only as evaluative or informational texts but also as socially situated performances within digitally mobile, transient communities.