The Language of Tourism

This chapter focuses on the language of tourism promotion and offers an overview of the role and features of promotional language, its importance, and its relationship to the language of tourism. It begins by familiarising the reader with some key principles of the language of advertising, which serves to highlight that tourism discourse shares many elements with it. The chapter then focuses in more depth on destination promotion and how it is achieved. The significance of destination image is explained, and a model is presented detailing the factors that affect destination image formation. One of the factors identified is the cultural background of the potential tourist, which supports the idea that the tourism message needs to be adapted for different cultural audiences. The chapter concludes by examining the main functions of the tourism text and how these are realised linguistically.