'A Luxury You Can Afford' : High-End Tourism in Travel Blog Discourse

With the luxury sector severely affected by the global financial crisis and luxury product sales facing the sluggish growth of new markets, analysts claim that luxury tourism is on the rise. In light of the above, the chapter sets out to investigate luxury travel blogs through an ethnographic and discourse-centred approach. The research aim is to observe how the discursive practices and textual performances of travel blogging bring about, and respond to, major changes in the travel and tourism industry. The analysis shows that travel blogs (with the social web) are more informal, personal and experience-based than the traditional genres of tourism discourse. However, despite these inclusive features, luxury travel bloggers adopt the same elitist stance typical of high-end travel. What is different is the rhetorical organisation of their cultural narratives that are updated to the affordances of the social web and the adaptive identity practices of the ‘post-class’ world.