New Gloss to Urban Heritage: The Discursive Repackaging of Scottish Cities as Wellness Retreats in Online Tourism Promotion Texts 2019-20

Abstract

The study, located at the intersection of Media, Tourism and Cultural Studies, is an analysis of the cultural identity of Scottish cities emerging from their on-line promotion as tourist destinations in the last pre-Covid-19 season 2019-20. It is argued that Scotland’s tangible and intangible urban heritage was consistently promoted as generating hedonistic, existential and spiritual experiences leading to an optimal state of individual well-being. The material under scrutiny involves official and independent tourism websites of six Scottish cities available on VisitScotland.com in 2019-20. Treated as cultural texts, they are analysed as evidence of the emergence of yet another commodified version of Scotland’s regional identity as a well-being paradise. The notion of place identity in the context of tourism is understood as a combination of selected physical attributes of a destination with a system of meanings and values attached to them by means of carefully planned discursive operations. Verbal discourse analysis is employed to demonstrate the prevalence of wellness discourse in the promotion of multifaceted urban heritage attractions. The term ‘palimpsest’ is proposed as a metaphoric description of the multi-layered place identities of the Scottish cities constructed in the texts under scrutiny. A concluding prediction is made that those identities constitute but a transient phase on the continuum of promotional efforts to adjust Scotland’s urban tourism offer to the changing consumer demand.