Contemporary travel writing: A snapshot of current tourism themes in travel magazine articles

Abstract

Travel magazine articles, a sub-genre of commercial travel writing, convey and potentially influence the feelings, experiences and intentions of travel writers and their readers. Communication techniques of twelve magazine articles internationally published and distributed have been qualitatively analysed with a thematic literary reading. Several themes emerged where contemporary travel articles appear to employ narrative devices that reflect tourism concepts related to the travelling self, such as the tourist-versus-traveller dichotomy and the promise of authentic and transformational experiences. The literature suggests that these techniques may serve as a means to market and sell travel, a destination, magazine or story, or, to convince the reader to believe a social commentary. This paper has identified tourism themes that were popular with travel writers for a particular moment in time; therefore, it would be useful for future research to make comparisons, as well as delve deeper into the intentions of the writers.