Where to stay in the UK and in Italy: a comparative study of the language of holiday accommodation advertisements

In recent years, the Internet's constant development has influenced the life of millions of people - radically changing the way in which they search for information - as well as the economic sectors, where the circulation of data all over the world has strengthen the market power of companies which used the net as a good promotional medium.
In particular, in the field of tourism, Internet has changed both the features of the intermediation system and of tourism promotion, offering new opportunities for competitiveness and success at low prices and, at the same time, increasing the quality of the services which are offered to customers.
A hotel website, for example, can provide tourists with a large number of useful services, such as the possibility to book a room online, to check availability and prices, to read and see the main features of the hotel thanks to detailed descriptions and photos. Given this state of affairs, customers have become more and more demanding when searching for information and this is the reason why, in order to be successful, tourism promotion needs to take into account the various aspects of the demand and to adopt particular strategies for the linguistic style, the content and the layout, whose role is to attract customers and persuade them to book a holiday in that particular place (Manca, 2009: 153-154). Therefore, promoting a holiday in a certain kind of accommodation does not mean just ‘describing', but also develop a kind of promotion which focuses on strategic linguistic and cultural elements, as they fascinate travellers and determine the success of the promotion itself.