Time to rethink tourism: a comparative linguistic analysis of strategies used by UK, USA and Italian tourism boards

Covid-19 has had a devastating impact on the tourism industry. As the sector is struggling to get back to business, research on new tourism trends as well as the promotional discourse employed is imperative. The aim of this paper is to investigate the promotional discourse used on three national tourism board websites (VisitBritain, VisitTheUSA and Italia.it). Specifically, a corpus-based quantitative and qualitative approach was used to examine the content and language of these tourism boards and conduct a comparative analysis in order to identify a set of best practices which will allow the know-how transfer for building more powerful tourist promotion, also on a local level. The findings suggest that the tourism sector is slowly bouncing back by diversifying products and markets, and promoting mainly domestic and regional tourism, as well as focusing on sustainability and related activities in an attempt to reallocate tourists to new destinations to tackle issues of over-tourism. From a linguistic point of view, there is a wide use of strategies of the tourism discourse illustrated by Dann (1996), namely ego-targeting, nostalgia, and nature. The new patterns concern the desire to discover a new side of tourism.