Image of Catalonia perceived by English-speaking and Spanish-speaking tourists

In the last decade, the volume of consumer and user-generated content (UGC) has increased notably alongside the expansion of social media. In the hospitality and tourism field, online travel reviews (OTRs) have grown exponentially. This article proposes a method to analyse the paratextual productions attached to OTRs and to extract from them the perceived image of the destination according to the tourists' origin. This method is applied to a random sample of 330,000 OTRs hosted in TripAdvisor about Things to Do in Catalonia written in Spanish or English from 2011 to 2015. According to the analysis of these opinions concerning the perceived (and transmitted) image among English-speaking and, especially, North American tourists, the main conclusion is that Catalonia is Barcelona and Barcelona is Gaudi.