Medical tourism has been seriously affected by coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) that has become a huge threat to global economy. In mitigating this issue, attention needs to be given to the online promotional message strategy to boost medical tourism. However, there is a scarcity of work on medical tourism promotional discourse from the textual function perspective despite the considerable number of studies in other types of discourse. This study, therefore, aims to examine and compare the promotional discourse message strategies in Malaysia and Thailand’s private hospital websites. The analysis was based on Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) perspective, using Halliday & Matthiessen’s model of textual analysis (2004) and Daneš’ classification of thematic patterns (1974). A total of six webpages with three webpages of one Malaysian website and one Thai website were analysed in relation to theme type and thematic progression. The findings show that texts derived from the hospital websites in Malaysia and Thailand display similarities and differences pertaining to how the texts are organised in relation to their theme types and thematic patterns. Both websites from Malaysia and Thailand combined objectivity with subjectivity in choosing their themes and thematic progression since they have a preference for unmarked themes in combination with marked theme to inform and persuade readers. However, the Prince Court Medical Centre (PCMC, Malaysia) website was direct and cohesive with its short texts and use of textual themes, while the message in Samitivej Hospital (SH, Thailand) website was more indirect, less compact, and less cohesive as the texts were rather lengthy and interspersed with interpersonal themes. The findings can be a guide for copywriters, website designers or medical tourism stakeholders to be aware of meaning-making strategies in promoting medical websites for medical tourism purpose.

Keywords: Textual Analysis; Theme and Thematic Progression; Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL); online promotional discourse; Medical Tourism

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