Go Before They’re Gone: A Comparative Analysis of Online Travel Coupon Advertising

The study examines travel coupon advertising, a widely used e-marketing tool exploited to promote products and services on intermediary e-commerce platforms (namely, Groupon, LivingSocial, Wowcher and Groupalia). The chapter presents a contrastive analysis of coupons promoting local tourist destinations in the USA, the UK, and Italy, highlighting the stylistic and structural differences between travel coupons and coupons advertising other kinds of deals (e.g. restaurants, treatments, courses) and noticing in the former a higher degree of intertextuality, more informative and instructional sections and a tendency towards a more direct appeal. The investigation also compares the textualization of national holydays in the three countries, identifying culture-specific elements in terms of motifs and descriptions in relation to the different focus given to specific attractions in the aim of seducing the reader by representing various paths of senses and interests.