https://doi.org/10.1177/1750481318805169 Discourse & Communication 2018, Vol. 12(6) 587–607 © The Author(s) 2018 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1750481318805169 journals.sagepub.com/home/dcm Persuading consumers: The use of conditional constructions in British hotel websites Miguel Fuster-Márquez IULMA, Universitat de València, España Carmen Gregori-Signes IULMA, Universitat de València, España Abstract Hotel websites display textual and non-textual strategies with the aim of turning online visitors into customers. This article focuses on two related textual aspects: how consumers are discursively construed and how conditional constructions are used in order to persuade and convince consumers of the adequacy of the hotel. The framework adopted for the analysis combines Stern’s notion of ‘implied consumer’ with a corpus-driven approach. The corpus data comprises 114 British hotel websites and totals half a million words. This is a subcorpus of COMETVAL, a database compiled at the University of València. The results reveal the importance of a number of words that address consumers directly or indirectly. These words intertwine with others to form patterns that help establish a bond between hoteliers and their clients. Further exploration of the corpus confirmed that some conditional sequences such as if you and should you are used by advertisers to speculate about the needs and wishes of consumers that the hotel can fulfil for them. The analysis suggests that conditional structures are a distinctive discursive characteristic strongly associated with the dialogic nature of the discourse hotel websites. Keywords Advertising, British hotel websites, conditional constructions, corpus linguistics, implied consumer, promotional and non-promotional discourse, tourism Corresponding author: Miguel Fuster-Márquez, IULMA and Departamento de Filologia Inglesa y Alemana, Facultad de Filologia, Traducción y Comunicación, Universidad de Valencia, Avda Blasco Ibáñez 32, Valencia 46010, España. Email: miguel.fuster@uv.es 805169DCM 0 0 10.1177/1750481318805169Discourse & CommunicationFuster-Márquez and Gregori-Signes research-article 2018 Article