Tourism Discourse

Introduction

Nowadays tourism can be considered one of the world’s largest industries which continues to expand at a rapid rate. Tourism development has been a profitable economic tool which made it an attractive industry and form of development for many countries and regions around the world.

In today’s highly competitive business environment, effective marketing is an essential activity of successful travel and tourism organisations. There are lot of different ways of raising costumer’s attention to a certain product, and one of them is doing it through the language. When creating an effective promotional material it is essential that the level of the language would be remarkable, since in promotional texts what is written and how it is

It is related to institutional type of discourse, which is reflected in the presence of a social institution, within which conversation takes place – it includes tour operators, who develop tours, tour agencies, that offer service in the sphere of tourism, airlines, transport organizations, that carry tourists around, advertising agencies, that promote tour products, organizations, publishing offices, that develop and publish promotional and informational material for tourists (Pogadaeva, 2008: 16), - and where participants of a communicative act manifest particular speech competences. When describing institutional type of discourse, Swales pointed out that it includes discursive societies which he defined as socio-rhetoric institutional groups that are connected by similar communicative goals (J. Swales, 1990). He added that members of a discursive society do not come from the same language society, which means that they could belong to different ethnolinguistic groups. Nevertheless, underlined Swales, they know special terminology, and have very high level of familiarity within a particular communicative sphere (J. Swales, 1990). Members of a discursive society are aware of particular features of information organization of the genre and the mechanisms of its exchange: the ways of presentation of communication goals belong to the whole society, and not to

“Tourists have three fundamental information needs: a need for orientation in foreign places, an interest in the place’s social and cultural history, and finally a need to save both money and time”. In guidebooks “tourists can learn about the history and culture of their destination from their guidebook; they are told which sights they must see; and the maps help them to navigate from their hotels to the sights and back. Because the authors of guidebooks have evaluated the quality of hotels and restaurants, finding a place to eat or sleep is easy. The risk of spending too much money is reduced, as tourists know exactly what is offered. This is what Baedeker envisaged with his guidebooks. He allegedly sought to create a guidebook that would make the traveller as independent as possible from all sorts of local tourism entrepreneurs such as hotel owners” (Koshar, 1998). Moreover, the information provided by guidebooks can free tourists from the personal tourist guide (Jack & Phipps, 2003). The role of this modern personal tourist guide, according to Cohen (1985), has four components. By showing instrumental leadership, the guide first ensures that the tour will go smoothly. “As a pathfinder, the guide has to lead the way, ensure that access is granted and bear responsibility for the behaviour of the tourists in his or her care. Second,