“Safe Holidays” in Veneto: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Health-related Information in Institutional Tourist Webpages

Going on holiday usually encompasses several planning activities, one of these being how to deal with possible health issues. COVID-19 has made this aspect more prominent also due to the variety of restrictive measures adopted worldwide. Even though, according to the WHO, the pandemic is officially over, there are many other reasons why tourists may need to retrieve health-related information before and during their holiday. In this regard, one of the first sources prospective visitors are likely to consult are local tourist websites administered by public institutions and private companies. This paper presents a case study carried out on institutional tourist websites in the Veneto Region, a popular destination for both Italian and foreign visitors. The aim is to explore whether and to what extent these websites feature health-related information in Italian and how much of this information is made available in English. The paper presents a follow-up of two previous contributions (Cesiri 2019; 2021), which investigated tourism promotion before, during, and immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic. Starting from the results of these two studies, the paper considers institutional tourist websites in the aftermath of the pandemic. By adopting qualitative multimodal discourse analysis methods of investigation, the paper analyses the communicative strategies employed in these websites to assess whether the health-related information available is easy to retrieve. Of particular concern are the foreign tourists who might not be informed about the organisation of the national health system and the services it provides through the local institutions.