WeChat Debuts Tools to Make It Easier for Tourism Boards to Create Microsites
Photo Credit: Tourism boards are building WeChat microsites to market to Chinese travelers. Pictured is a Chinese couple visiting Yamashita Park in Japan. Flickr / Toshihiro Gamo
Skift Take
Many tourism boards now have entire teams dedicated to China and WeChat. It's a very complex task for foreigners to get the content right, but it appears as though WeChat parent Tencent is trying to make the platform more accessible for tourism boards.
Tourism boards in popular gateway cities throughout the United States and Europe have seen thousands of Chinese tourists pass through their streets, hotels, and attractions in recent years.
This year, 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, doubled down on its work with U.S. and European tourism organizations this year. In September, Tencent announced a suite of advertising tools for U.S. tourism boards to reach Chinese travelers on WeChat, the largest messaging and digital commerce mobile app in China.
With the new tools are designed to make it easier for tourism boards to put content on WeChat and build microsites to help reach WeChat's nearly one billion users.
Many Chinese merchants already use WeChat microsites to reach consumers, said Poshu Yeung, vice president of international bus
