This paper examines the use of conceptual metaphors in the language of tourism. The methodology adopted is corpus-based: a corpus of travel journalism was annotated for semantic category and then compared with a reference corpus. Observation of the key semantic domains revealed a large number of instances of three conceptual metaphors: travel is escape, travel is discovery and travel is magic. These conceptual metaphors are discussed both in terms of their pragmatic uses and in relation to a multi-level view of conceptual metaphors.