Persuasive discourse in tourism web pages: health resorts in Ukraine’s Carpathian mountains.

Abstract

Considering that the Internet has become the main resource for acquiring information about tourist destinations and it is a powerful domain for building a strong destination image, this thesis aims to analyze tourism websites from a multimodal perspective and distinguish the main persuasive features of tourism discourse. Specifically, I focus on health resorts’ promotional materials, investigating how two luxury health tourism institutions represent and promote themselves through their major e-commerce platforms to attract travellers and encourage them to buy tourist products such as health services. As the main goal of any tourism website is to entice potential customers, the webmasters use specific linguistic and non-linguistic patterns to capture attention, maintain interest, generate desire, and ultimately get the desired action from the users. In the marketing field, choosing the right kind of discourse can lead to success, since the choice of words and linguistic structures together with various supporting elements is fundamental when trying to persuade people. Bearing in mind that the language selection of tourism discourse is not a random one, I address textual, visual, and audio-visual components across the selected samples to identify how health tourism language serves promotional purposes and to determine what types of communication strategies are used to achieve the marketing aim. This study examines promotional techniques utilized to attain an influential effect on potential tourists, it investigates verbal language, images, videos, 3D tours, maps, online webcams, layouts, and other visual signs to better understand their main persuasive features.