Website discourses and tourism place meanings: Comparing ski areas and adjacent rural communities

Contextualized within regional landscapes, ski areas and rural towns are tourist destinations as well as symbols of social and cultural identity – and in their website discourses, each asserts place meanings. This study examines how ski areas and adjacent rural communities used language, symbolism, and imagery to communicate destination images and meanings of place, and whether their website presentations aligned in promoting and marketing tourism attractions. Small, medium, and large ski areas in Vermont (USA), representing a range of sizes, locations, and tourism development levels, were paired with adjacent rural communities. Discourse analyses of visual and written texts from ski area and town websites identified individual differences in place presentation, as well as three general discourses that varied by scale: discourses of affiliation (small places), discourses of aspiration (medium-sized places), and discourses of appropriation (large places). These were elaborated along with a fourth discourse of imagined places common to all study sites that elevated place meanings to mythic levels. This research illustrates how ski areas and rural communities discursively construct place meanings that also vary by level of local tourism development. In doing so, though, they may ignore collaborative place-making opportunities in regional tourism planning and marketing.