Click Here, Book Now! Discursive Strategies of Tourism on the Web

The World Tourism Organization has recently confirmed the tourism industry as one of the fastest growing sectors in international business markets. This rapid growth has resulted in an equally rapid transformation of the communication strategies employed by the tourism industry. Since holidays cannot be inspected for purchase beforehand and since expectations are constructed on product representation and description which cannot be seen before the actual tourist experience, the Internet has begun to be regarded as a dynamic source of information. Indeed, the Internet enables tourists to explore a chosen interactive multimedia site in order to obtain the required information about a destination. Although this aspect has promoted extensive research on tourism from various fields of economics, geography, sociology, psychology and anthropology, little attention has been devoted to it from a linguistic perspective. This paper aims to discuss the strategies exploited by the tourist industry to structure web-texts where their main feature seems to be the careful selection and presentation of information designed in such a way as to attract attention by paradoxically disturbing any process of predictable reading on the screen in a conventional way. The resulting multi- and hyper-modal peculiarities of tourism texts are clearly the consequence of a changing society where the dynamic interrelations between profit, new forms of (web)communication and the presence of emerging professional figures as well as audiences, showing more and more familiarity with information technology rather than with traditional operators, has profoundly influenced tourism discourse to such an extent that tourism seems to have as many facets as one could possibly imagine.