Post-trip narratives. A cross-cultural analysis of UK and Italian tourists’ online accounts

Tourism discourse is a discourse of identity construction, promotion, recognition and acceptance, which is built through the manipulation of linguistic and visual texts (Kaplan and Hallett 2010). It is unquestionable, however, that the spread of the worldwide web has dramatically transformed tourism communication: from the ‘monologue’ of the past, when travel agencies had a dominant role and established a top-down communication, to today’s online dialogues, in which individual tourists take part in the promotion of any destination and interact with other travellers by giving their feedback (Dann 1996). Nowadays, tourists’ comments and opinions, being witnesses for other tourists and testimonials to the quality of a destination, are invaluable resources for the tourism industry. In this context, the present work intends to investigate the online feedback posted by UK travellers in Italy and Italian travellers in the UK, in order to explore to what extent the linguistic features of post-trip discourse reflect a different cultural gaze (Urry - Larsen 2011), that is, an ideological attitude towards tourist destinations and tourism at large. The corpus is made up of about 36,000 words, downloaded from Tripadvisor, in which the feedback of Italian tourists visiting the British Museum is compared to British tourists’ feedback visiting the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples. Tourists’ accounts of their own travel experience are influenced by their cultural background and, at the same time, they construct or reinforce socio-cultural identities. We will try to show that the category of tourist feedback, shaped in the webgenre of the review, is conceived and achieved differently by British and Italian tourists, especially in terms of the implementation of different cultural frames (Baker and Fillmore 2009) and construction of mental spaces (Fauconnier 1985: 2011).