Communicating tourism: language and media

“Professional communication in the tourism industry is a prime consideration for all business organizations large or small, private or public, national or international, as their common denominator resides in operating to attract potential customers to their products and services” (Edwards and Curado, 2003: 42). This is the reason why, before describing the media, explaining the role of promotion in tourism will be useful. The tourism sector has developed considerably in the last decades and nowadays “it represents the largest industry in the world” (Dann, 1996: 1).
Unlike the language of tourism, which has only recently started to be investigated, as it has been already mentioned in the first chapter, new marketing sectors concerning leisure have emerged to follow the development of tourism: for example, “marketing in travel and tourism”, “leisure marketing” or also “destination marketing”. These new marketing areas have been broadly analysed by a large number of scholars and researchers, such as Reid (1989), Sinclair and Stabler (1991), Brent-Ritchie and Goeldner (1994), Middleton and Clarke (2001) and Horner and Swarbrooke (2005), to mention just a few names. All their books place emphasis on the crucial role of communication and promotion in the tourism field: only by communicating and promoting places and the offered services, can tour operators make themselves known, so that people become aware of their existence. Coulson and Thomas (1986) state that:
The role of promotion is to communicate with individuals, group or organizations so as to directly and indirectly facilitate exchanges by informing and persuading one or more of the audience to accept an organization”s products. Coulson and Thomas (1986, in Horner and Swarbrooke, 2005: 128).
Looking at the etymology of the word “promotion”, this comes from the Latin “pro-movere”, meaning “to encourage”, “to foster” and “to promote” “The preposition “pro-” before the verb “movere” [...] recalls the motivating component of the movement in favour of something, in other words, the manipulative power of promotion” (Francesconi, 2007: 43). This persuasive aim refers to the satisfaction of the essential advertising requirements, summarized by Winfried Nöth (1990) with the acronym AIDA, that is to say “capture Attention, maintain Interest, create Desire and get Action” (Dann, 1996: 44).
Promotion is only one of the well-known four Ps of the marketing mix (i.e. Product, Price, Place and Promotion), but within tourism it is the most important, since only by communicating and promoting a place or an attraction can the relationship between sender, i.e. the tourism industry, and the receiver, i.e. a person and potential tourist, start. John Bowen (1993) affirms that “Promotion is communication”, meaning that “promotion is communication that organizations use to pursue their marketing objectives” (Bowen, 1993 in Francesconi, 41-42). In fact, the “tourism promotion mix”, which includes the strategies used to promote a tourism “product” as a whole, is also labelled the “tourism communication mix”. This mix consists of four marketing strategies: advertising, personal selling, public relations and sales promotion, which will be outlined in the following four subsections.