Rhetoric and marketing in tourism websites through visual figures

Résumé

The persuasive influence of tourism promotional materials is very much experienced today. To gain the attention of viewers, the travel companies choose various techniques in their digital texts. Non-linguistic elements play an important role in tourism discourse; they hold a persuasive function. Pictures are essential elements for attraction and seduction; they are the trigger elements to tourists. There exist different visual techniques in tourism marketing to engage and convince potential tourists to book a tourism product. The present article discusses visual solutions for tourism websites to allure potential tourists. The paper reviews the influential elements of persuasive web tourism marketing pictures. These components provide useful information, create additional experiences in the viewers and help them finalize their decisions. The article highlights how these components as persuasive strategies of tourism promotional materials can influence the decisions of tourism websites’ users. The result section provides the real examples of deployment of the mentioned techniques to convince the audience by the website of “Karpaty” resort (Ukraine). All these techniques are worth attention as they play a decisive role in the promotion of tourism services. The data collection of this study will provide updated information in relation to the rhetoric of tourism.

Keywords: tourism discourse; tourism promotion; persuasive discourse; persuasive pictures; influential images in marketing.