Travel brochure: Russian impressions tour
(Text Analysis)
Recently, a great number of ESP-related (English for Specific Purposes) studies on
professional disciplines such as commercial English, medical English and legal English have
been explored in the context of applied linguistics. However, in the last decade, the English of
tourism has also started receiving attention from researchers. In this Information Age, despite the
availability of easily accessible promotional tools, such as e-brochures and websites, the print
travel brochures remain as popular as ever. Because of the heterogeneous nature of tourism
products, travel brochures have a distinctive function in that they can act as “a substitute for a
product which cannot be physically seen or inspected prior to purchase” (Holloway 2004: 17). In
this paper, I’m going to analyse the promotional brochure about a variety of local tours
organized by International travel solutions agency to Moscow.
In a genre analysis of promotional travel texts and in particular of the travel brochure,
the research defines the following structure:
1. Announcing the products
2. Attracting attention
3. Establishing credentials
4. Introducing products
Step 1: Indicating the products/services
Step 2: Stating essential elements of products/services
5. Calling for action
First of all, let us analyse the structure of brochure part by part. The announcing of the
product is one of the most important points of its structure; it must be clear, visible and
, attractive. For instance, in here, in the front page of the brochure we find the name of the tour
“Russian impressions tour” and the slogan (a catchy phrase used to sell a service) of the agency
“Bringing Eastern Europe closer to you” that sound quite appealing for tourists. As we can
see the authors of this brochure use its space to their advantage by including a lot of eye-catching
photos along with the text that speaks directly to the reader (“You”).
Because of the limited space of brochure, we are not going to find long blocks of text
within the brochure, first, because it looks intimidating for the reader, second, because the
authors only need to provide the most important information about their products, stressing its
benefits and not just naming its excellent features. It’s essential to keep the content relevant and
brief enough to not run out of your reader's interest. Thus, the language is simple and direct;
instead of long paragraphs, we find short paragraphs with numbered list of days of the tour for
further separation of the text. These elements, along with the great pictures, bring the readers’
eyes into the brochure.
In order to introduce the product (tour) the brochure is organized into different
itineraries. The text on each page is structured vertically starting from the first attraction to visit,
accompanied by the attractive images of the tour, to the last one in a particular day, thus, a
“reading order” (the way the brochure is designed to be read) is imposed. Consequently, this
order guides readers to read from the top to the bottom of the page. For example, in the first
column we find the description of the activities for the first and the second day of the tour,
whereas third and the fourth days are described in another column just next to the first one.
It’s a well-known fact that the objectives of tourism advertising are not different from
those of advertising for other products. Berger (2004: 71) describes advertisements as “a genre of
communication that use words and images to convince people exposed to the advertisement to
purchase the product or service being promoted”. Bearing this definition in mind, we see that the
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