Keywords

• Nowadays
• the formation of Tourism Destination Image can be shaped through the mediation between web touristsâ€
• ™
• initial mental constructs and web-based promotional discourses. These encounters run the risk of being unbalanced by the social power of discursive agents used to constrain imagery and discourse processing. Such risks are even higher when web tourists have no/little organic images of less known destinations. This paper focuses on how these events contribute to promoting an induced Tourism Destination Image when online searches are performed for either real travel planning or virtual tourism. A qualitative study was conducted on samples promoting the southern Italian region of Calabria. Findings show that linguistic and visual features were manipulated to concur as subtle discursive agents through the use of psychological attributes. Intentional distortion of discourse was found to be facilitated by recipientsâ€
• ™
• trust
• and by the absence of web ethics