A Comparison of Rhetorical Move Structures of Hotel, Restaurant, and Tourist Destination Homepages
Keywords:
hotel homepages, restaurant homepages, tourist destination homepages. Move analysis, promotional discourse, writing strategies.Abstract
The worldwide tourism industry in the era of globalization is marked with extremely fierce competition. It is crucial for hoteliers, restauranteurs, and tourist destination owners and operators to advertise their venues, products, and services effectively. A website is an important communication tool for hotel, restaurant, and tourist destination marketing organizations (Law & Hsu, 2006; Law et al., 2010) to attract potential audiences and customers. The content on
the website, therefore, needs to be high quality and organized in the way that is most effective. This paper, therefore, aims to analyze the moves, and their structures, as well as the writing strategies used in each move in the content area of
popular international hotel, restaurant, and tourist destination homepages, and to compare them across these three tourism products. Twenty four hotel homepages, twenty four restaurant homepages and twenty four tourist destination
homepages from eight different countries were selected as the sample for analysis, employing the generic structure of advertisement proposed by Van der Vliet & Redeker (2014) as the analysis framework. The main results revealed
that differences existed between the moves reported in the analysis framework and those found in each of the corpora in the present study. Homepages in each of the corpora also exhibited slight differences in terms of moves and their
structures, pointing out variations that are caused by different types of products and services in the tourism industry. Moreover, the writing strategies found in each move were varied, yet they all helped to deliver their common communicative purposes.
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