Dragon Trail International: ‘2021 Full-Year Wechat Rankings Report'
Beijing, 28th January, 2022 - Dragon Trail’s WeChat Rankings Report for 2021 examines and analyzes the performance of six categories of travel brands on WeChat: national tourism organizations (NTOs), destination marketing organizations (DMOs, referring to regional and municipal tourism boards), airlines, cruise lines, museums and attractions, and hotels.
After nearly two years, the impact of the pandemic for tourism marketing is obvious, with reduced content and declining reading rates in most categories. However, the continued growth of average views per post in the NTO category, as well as some particularly adaptable and stand-out accounts in this and other categories, shows that Chinese travellers are still ready to engage with travel brands on WeChat.
Reading Rates and Content Volume
Content from international tourism-related WeChat accounts has seen a marked decline since the start of the pandemic, with fewer active accounts, and many active accounts scaling back the amount of posts they create for Chinese audiences. The exception to this is hotel accounts, which have stayed very consistent in terms of publishing schedules over the years – but this category is different to the others because most of the international hotels on the list do have domestic Chinese properties that they can continue to promote.
The performance of international tourism-related WeChat content in terms of viewership is mixed, but not necessarily negative. NTO content actually saw a slight increase in average views per post in 2021 compared to the previous year – moreover, views per post in this category have grown consistently for the last three years, with no pandemic-related decline. Average views per post for DMOs appear to have taken off dramatically, but this is solely because of the extremely high reading rates for content published and heavily promoted by the Macao Government Tourism Organization. Without Macau in the picture, we see that views of DMO content declined slightly in 2021 but has stayed fairly stable over the past five years. Attractions also saw a small decrease in average views per article in 2021. While views for hotel content were down year-on-year, they are still significantly higher than they were pre-pandemic.
The major declines in viewership are in the airline and cruise line categories. Given that the volume of international flights to and from China stands at just over 2% of pre-pandemic levels, this is hardly surprising. For cruise lines, most have also been unable to offer a product to the Chinese market these last two years, although there were a few bright spots from accounts with adaptive strategies and strong content.
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