A twofold commodification of “place” in hotel websites and its consequences for the discursive creation of a tourist identity

Abstract

Tourism is a global cultural industry and one of the world’s largest international trades (Thurlow & Jaworski, 2011). As far as tourism is understood as an agent and channel of globalisation (Pritchard & Jaworski, 2005), it makes sense to investigate it from a critical perspective and analyse how its discourse shapes the tourist experience. The aim of this study is to explore ways in which hotel websites project a place identity for the hotel and, in doing so, for the town or city in which the hotel is located. I will ask how, and in what ways, this representation relies on socio-cultural conventions, which in turn may influence the discursive construction of the social actor “tourist”. Using Critical Discourse Analysis (see e.g. Fairclough, 1999, 2002) as a framework, I will also draw on Halliday’s (1985) transitivity system to identify the representational choices underlying the semantic encoding of the services the hotel offers made by the promoter of the hotel on its website. Using the concordancing tool AntConc 3.4.2 (Anthony, 2014), I will trace patterns of use, allowing for a further qualitative analysis of the data. The study is also of interest to the tourist industry inasmuch as it offers an insight into the social construction of a “tourist” identity, shaped according to prevailing symbols and codes in modern society