Travel Writing for Tourism and City Branding: Urban Place Writing Methodologies

Travel Writing for Tourism and City Branding is an insightful, expert-led book which provides tourism students with a practice-based approach to producing researched literary travel writing on an urban destination, using the writing process as a research tool in itself. The book is scientifically supported with full academic references for researchers.

On a global basis, city councils and destination managers are seeking new ways to commission and sponsor professional content authors as part of place-branding projects for tourism development. Given the increasing prevalence of such content within the tourism industry, this book provides a cohesive overview of literary travel writing, presenting it as an enquiry process that can be applied by writer-researchers to spaces that have value to them. Travel writing is presented as a methodological practice that researchers can learn and apply to their own projects, both in academic settings and in commercial city branding. Examples of literary travel writing are carefully examined throughout and their affects refracted through further work. Enriched with a wealth of case studies, chapters are presented in such a way that readers can take the work as a model for their own projects.

This informative and practical volume will be of great interest to students of tourism marketing, destination marketing, place branding and travel writing, as well as current creators of commercial tourism marketing content.

Dr Charlie Mansfield has been a university lecturer since 1995 and taught until January 2022 at the University of Plymouth in Tourism Management and French, where he was also co-director of the heritage research centre. He completed a major, funded research project for the CNRS with the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in digital heritage management and was a research academic with the University of Edinburgh from January 2005 until July 2009 where he successfully completed an AHRC-funded research project to digitise medieval literature. He is an independent researcher and travel writer, regularly running summer schools for literary travel writers.

Dr Jasna Potočnik Topler has been teaching at the University of Maribor, Slovenia since 2014. She completed her studies in English language and literatures and in Journalism, and was awarded her PhD at the University of Ljubljana. Currently, she holds the position of Associate Professor. Her field of research includes cultural tourism with its subtypes, languages, tourism and media discourse, and communication. She is the author of monographs, scientific articles, conference lectures, and an editorial board member of many journals. She has been engaged in several international projects and in projects with students; the most recent under the EU Erasmus+ Programme KA220-HED is IN-COMM GUIDE that enhances active and inclusive teaching of literacy and communication skills for better employment and sustainable economic growth. As a guest lecture she has had cooperation with many European universities.