Ekaterina Ignatova

Thesis Outline

The interaction between hosts and guests, one of the essential aspects of tourism, provides an opportunity to get acquainted with the sociocultural context of other nations, thus improving international relations. However, there are concerns that promotional tourism discourse contributes to shaping asymmetrical power relations between guests and hosts and jeopardizes hospitality.

There are indications that guests and hosts can be represented differently in different tourism destinations. In addition, with large cities being important travel hubs and extending their influence in the travel industry, few studies pay attention to the representation of people in tourism discourse about city destinations and conduct a systematic comparison of discourses about destinations with different sociocultural backgrounds. Apart from that, most studies exploring the representation of people in tourism analyse promotional or mass media discourse neglecting user-generated discourse, such as online travel reviews.

Taking into account that multimodality and visual representation are integral features of tourism discourse and that meanings expressed in the visual modes can differ from those expressed through the verbal modes, this research aims to explore and compare how people, in particular, hosts and guests, are represented in terms of multimodality in online travel reviews about three travel destinations, namely, Moscow, London, and Bangkok.