The main goal of this paper is to provide insight into our parallel corpus-based approach to the creation of a term bank in the subject area of tourism. The term bank is based on a unidirectional parallel corpus of Portuguese-English tourist advertising material and it is conceived as a tool for all those interested in finding linguistic, conceptual and pragmatic information on the terminology of tourism. Thus, it can become particularly useful for translators, who need to master the specialized lexical items and find their appropriate foreign language equivalents, and tourism professionals, who work in an increasingly multilingual society and would gain from access to a ‘ready-made’ bilingual list of terms.