“We Look Forward to Seeing You”: Air Travel Digital Discourse in the Post-peak Pandemic Period

Abstract

The unfolding of the Covid-19 crisis has had a detrimental impact on global travel and tourism. In particular, the air transport industry has been affected severely and will need to undergo radical change to still be operating in the aftermath of the pandemic. Within the framework of Corporate Discourse Studies, and relying on a corpus-assisted discourse analysis approach, the current article explores how airlines use online language to neutralize the discourses that create distrust and to highlight their achievements and commitment in order to encourage air travel in the post-peak period. This analysis is meant to empirically contribute to the existing literature on the topic of trust in corporate discourse and communication by shedding some light on the discursive strategies employed by airline companies to (re)construct travel experience in time of crisis.

Keywords

• corporate discourse
• air travel digital discourse
• discourse analysis
• corpus linguistics
• covid-19.