A genre-based analysis of tourist travel guides

Abstract

This is a genre-based analysis study of a move-structure of online tourist travel guides of three Asian countries: Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines. Kathpalia’s nine-move structure (1992) for advertising is adopted as a framework to analyse the selected travel guides using Atlas ti (a qualitative data analysis software). The selection of data is based on the latest edition of Asian online travel guides. The main purposes of this study are to analyze the move structures, their strategies and communicative purposes, identify the prevalent move(s) in the selected travel guides, and find out whether the selected travel guides have the same move structures. The findings of this study show that Malaysia Travel Guide (MTG) has eight moves, six of them are the same as Kathpalia’s framework (1992) and there are two new moves. In addition, Thailand Travel Guide (TTG) has five moves, three of them are related to Kathpalia’s study (1992) and the rest are new. Moreover, the Philippines Travel Guide which is entitled ‘Your Guide to the Philippines’ has six moves, four of them are the same as Kathpalia’s and two of them are new. The prevalent moves in these three travel guides are ‘Headline’ and ‘Appraising the Country’; whereas the peripheral moves in the selected travel guides are ‘Targeting the Market, Important Contact Numbers and Websites, and Extra Information’. Interestingly, all the realized moves have different strategies in each travel guide. Finally, the results highlight the diversity of moves in the selected online travel guides which are related to the nature of the country, perception and aims of the writer.