Narrative resources in destination storytelling on Instagram

An analysis of the English-language posts of Italian regional tourism boards

Abstract

Storytelling has become an increasingly influential concept in tourism marketing, where destinations are frequently promoted through narratives designed to facilitate emotional engagement, identification, and narrative transportation. From a narratological perspective, however, storytelling traditionally implies the representation and communication of a story involving events, actors, and temporal development. This distinction is particularly relevant in social media communication, where promotional texts are often brief, fragmented, and lacking fully developed plots. Drawing on Abbott’s (2008) notion of minimal narrative and on broader narratological approaches to narrativity, this study investigates the narrative resources through which destinations acquire narrativity in Instagram tourism discourse. The analysis is based on a specialised corpus of 74,319 words comprising 1,021 English-language Instagram posts published by nine Italian regional tourism boards between August 2025 and February 2026. Adopting a corpus-assisted discourse analytic approach, the study combines quantitative corpus-linguistic techniques with qualitative concordance analysis to examine three interconnected narrative dimensions: characterisation through personification and anthropomorphisation, experiential immersion, and temporality. The findings reveal that destinations are systematically represented as humanised entities endowed with agency, communicative abilities, personality traits, and symbolic identities. Experiential immersion is realised through the interaction of projected participation, sensory immersion, and affective framing, which encourage readers to imaginatively participate in projected destination experiences. Temporality is constructed through recurring patterns of temporal idealisation, temporal suspension, mythical temporality, and future orientation, frequently combined within the same promotional texts. The study further shows that these dimensions rarely operate independently but interact to create destination representations characterised by agency, experiential immersion, and temporal depth. The paper argues that Instagram tourism discourse often relies not on fully developed stories but on recurring narrative resources and minimal narratives that contribute to the construction of narrativity. By integrating narratological theory with tourism discourse analysis, the study provides new insights into the linguistic mechanisms through which destinations are represented, experienced, and imagined in contemporary social media communication.