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During the global COVID pandemic, cooking and baking have reemerged as popular at-home pastimes. In this essay, we focus on digital cooking classes offered by Airbnb. Responding to restrictions on physical mobility, as well as to the sudden demand for leisure activities which could be experienced from one's home, in early April 2020, Airbnb launched a new service called "Online Experiences" (OEs). While the types of OEs offered on the platform are varied, approximately 30% center around digitally mediated food-preparation. Through our thematic analysis of consumer reviews of OEs, we explore how participants perceive and conceptualize these new digital food-related experiences. Our close analysis of review texts finds that many OE participants discuss these online food activities in terms of digital commensality, highlighting the social connectedness promoted by the act of cooking or baking when performed as a joint action online. In this innovative context, online food-related experiences appear to also stimulate a sense of 'virtual travel.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of the Web 2.0 profoundly changed the tourist experience and its modes of interaction and communication. Among the most pervasive forms of contemporary tourism discourse we find online reviews posted on social media platforms as TripAdvisor. Previous research on online travel reviews focused almost exclusively on negative reviews and mostly considered monolingual English dataset. In the present study we will explore positive reviews and we will add a cross-linguistic analysis comparing reviews written in English, Italian and Dutch. In this contribution, we first explore the move structure of reviews, and then delve into their different linguistic realizations, paying particular attention to potential cross-linguistic similarities and divergences. Our results show that positive reviews are generally formed by four main moves: positive and negative evaluations, offering extra/background information and future-oriented recommendations. These moves represent stable and recurrent features in reviews written in all three languages under examination. Further, also the topics of the reviews display a cross-linguistic tendency towards similarity, with the preferred topics being the accommodation, its services and the staff. The findings also highlight some divergences among the three language groups, especially not on what is said but on how it is said. For instance, in reviews written in Italian we found expressions of thankfulness and congratulations to the staff, while these are practically absent in the other languages. Moreover, we observed that Italian reviewers tend to realize positive evaluations in a more intensified way (e.g. through the use of superlative lexical expressions) while these strategies are used far less frequently in British and Dutch reviews. With this study we seek to contribute to research in the field of (digital) tourism discourse providing one of the first discourse-oriented analyses on reviews of positive polarity. Moreover, performing a comparative analysis, we aim at gaining a deeper insight on the issue of multilingualism within (online) tourism communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At present, the existing 2.0 Web is far more multilingual than was ever anticipated in the early days of the Internet (Hale, 2014; Hale & Eleta, 2017). Indeed, the increasing variety of languages is a phenomenon that signals the end of the first stages of the digital era in which the Internet was characterized by English-language dominance (Leppänen & Peuronen, 2012). This study primarily aims to present the emerging topics in multilingual research that focus on 2.0 platforms. It presents a literature review and discusses a number of multilingual strategies adopted by different platforms. Five popular platforms have been considered, namely Wikipedia, Facebook, Instagram, Booking.com and TripAdvisor, with close attention paid to travel platforms (and TripAdvisor, in particular). For 2.0 platform providers such as TripAdvisor, multilingualism constitutes a challenge. Typically, these platforms do not opt for an English-only rule, but rather develop linguistic policies in order to accommodate their multilingual users (Cenni & Goethals, 2017). The case of TripAdvisor is particularly striking, not least because it is characterized by the coexistence of two divergent multilingual strategies on the same platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]