Travel Blogs and Lists of Suggestions

Inspired by the rising popularity of professional travel blogs to affect consumer decisions and destination images, this study focuses on lists of suggestions, analysing the innovative use of this staple genre in the domain of tourism 2.0. In particular, after selecting a sample of successful blogs in English, the rhetorical features that are commonly used to build expert status and offer advice through stancetaking are examined for their potential to yield insights into the fast-changing cultural configurations of tourism and travel. Research shows that professional travel bloggers share the codified linguistic, discursive and representational strategies of mainstream tourism discourse. At the same time, capitalising on the preferences for identity cues shown by their networked audiences, they adjust advice-giving to their idiosyncratic travelling style and add professedly autobiographical storytelling and auto-ethnographic reflexivity to otherwise conventional moves. The result is a diverse mix of narrative elements and fictive identities – adventure seeking and place branding, creativity and homogenisation, the traveller and the tourist. Expert stance is now achieved in a peer-to-peer dialogue with ‘affective publics’ that privilege uninterrupted contact on the web and commonsensical tips and cursory information from like-minded individuals over knowledgeable but distant advisors.