Monday, December 18, 2017
WeChat doubled down on its works with the US and European tourism organizations this year making its tools to make easier for the tourism boards to create micro sites.
The year 2017, many of those organizations got smarter about how to market to the more than 145 million outbound Chinese tourists who traveled internationally.
Tencent, a Chinese Internet and telecommunications conglomerate that owns WeChat has announced a suite of advertising tools for United States tourism boards to reach Chinese travellers on WeChat, the largest messaging and digital commerce mobile app in China.
Many Chinese merchants already use WeChat microsites to reach consumers. Many major U.S. and European cities had already upped their investment in WeChat this year even before Tencent’s new ad products debuted.
Helsinki Marketing, the city’s tourism board, for example, will launch a WeChat microsite in early 2018 and also signed a partnership with Tencent in September to be a test city for the company’s new WeChat tourism products. These include an augmented reality application, panoramic maps, and data-sharing.
The WeChat content will be similar to the content on the organization’s redesigned My Helskinki site, said Laura Aalto.
Aalto said the growing number of Chinese tourists travelling abroad without a tour group was a factor in getting more serious about WeChat.
The Chinese travellers start to do their planning and booking online when their English is better and that’s when they start to think about going abroad alone.
Tags: Chinese tourists, microsites, travel technology, US and European tourism organizations, WeChat
