Tourism Destination Image and Irish Websites

This article addresses the issue of the formation of Tourist Destination Image through the analysis of the specific tourism discourse - the linguistic variety of English generally used in tourism , which was applied by some Irish websites promoting accommodation in hostels and advertising local festivals: the study focuses on the way tourism discourse contributes to convey an induced image of a destination. Tourism Destination Image (T.D.I.) can actually be shaped through the mediation between tourists’ mental constructs and web-based promotional tourism material. The survey was partly developed during my English course in Tourism Studies, university of Palermo. A linguistic study was conducted on samples of texts from websites promoting both accommodation in Irish hostels and, parallelly, a new and more dynamic image of Dublin and Irish towns, also through the promotion of typical local festivals and events. Results show that linguistic features were used together with psychological attributes.