1. Introduction
Leisure activities have become one of the main spiritual food of people’s life, benefit from people living in the environment of information explosion for a long time (Yao, 2020). Tourism became the primary choice of leisure and entertainment for most people, which is in a golden period of development (Yao, 2014). Moreover, among the popular tourist destinations, Xi’an is one of the four historical and cultural ancient cities in the world, together with Athens, Cairo and Rome (Chen & Wang, 2021). Meantime, due to the rapid development of new media industry, the use of new media for tourism publicity is unstoppable. This paper investigates the main impact of new media on Xi’an tourism. And it will study three aspects: the application background of new media in tourism market, the analysis of the current situation of Xi’an tourism new media application and the main impact of new media on Xi’an tourism destinations. Finally, the main results were concluded.
2. Background
Nowadays, there are various forms of new media, which completely penetrate into people’s life and become an indispensable part of people’s life. In this case, the use of new media for various publicity activities has become the most effective, convenient and fast marketing method (Yang, 2017). Combined with the rapid development of tourism, it is common for new media publicity to be used in the promotion of tourism destinations, especially in the publicity of famous domestic tourism destinations: Xi’an, Chongqing, Chengdu, etc. Xi’an has a profound historical and cultural heritage, and actively uses new media to publicize the image and characteristics of tourism destinations, which promote Xi’an has become an online popular tourism city (Li, 2020). Specifically, the tourist number of Xi’an has been developing steadily before 2016, but since new media, such as Wechat, Tiktok and short videos were used, the tourist number of Xi’an was increasing (Peng, 2021). Especially, in 2018, Xi’an’s new media propaganda was diversified, the year-on-year growth rates of tourist reception and tourism revenue were 36.73% and 56.42% respectively (Peng, 2021). Furthermore, according to Li’s research (Li et al., 2021), new media publicity has gradually become the main channel of tourism publicity. More specific, the organic integration of the tourism industry and new media technology could help promote the development of the tourism industry, increase the potential consumer groups of the tourism industry, and play a positive role in the innovative development, optimization and upgrading of the tourism industry (Luo, 2020). However, the development of Internet technology also means that the complexity of new media publicity is much higher than traditional publicity, and there will be some problems in actual operation, which would affect the initial publicity goal (Li et al., 2021). The application of new media in Xi’an tourism has become more and more mature, and its role is also clearly reflected.
3. Xi’an New Media Application
As the “ancient capital of the thirteen Dynasties”, Xi’an has created the label of “world famous historical city” for itself with many historical and cultural heritages. Due to hot new social search topics like: Yongxingfang bowl throwing wine, little sister of the tumbler, Datang never night city, and so on, Xi’an became an online red city in China, which attracted many new media users has visited Xi’an (Tian, 2020). This part will study the current situation of Xi’an new media publicity based on the new media publicity data and the number of tourists and tourism income.
3.1. Xi’an New Media Data
Since the merger of Xi’an Cultural Bureau and Xi’an Tourism Bureau, Xi’an has actively used new media to promote Xi’an tourism. It is obvious from Table 1 that Xi’an culture and Tourism Bureau attaches importance to the application of new media in tourism development year by year. Specifically, in 2019, Micro-blog,
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Table 1. Xi’an Social Media data flow.
Source: Xi’an bureau of culture and tourism: Xi’an bureau of culture and tourism annual report on government information disclosure in 2019, 2020, and 2021.
Wechat, Baidu Baijia number and TV are main tourism marketing channels, among those, Baidu Baijia number and micro-blog are the main publicity platforms adopted in Xi’an. Baidu Baijia number has the largest readers number, which reflects that in 2019, Xi’an tourism new media publicity mainly focuses on Baidu Baijia number, followed by micro-blog 1,530,000 users. However, during this period, the main new media experience platforms of the public have been transformed into Wechat, microblog and short video platforms. Then, in 2020, Micro-blog and Baidu Baijia number was still the main platform for new media publicity in Xi’an. But Tiktok short video promotion suddenly entered the perspective of the majority of tourists and got quite good achievement. The Tiktok new users and likes number achieved 125,000 and 916,000 respectively in 2020. By 2021, the official publicity media of Xi’an tourism has grasped the preferences of consumers. Tiktok and Wechat have become the main new media platforms for Xi’an tourism publicity. These two new media software are the most popular social media in China and are used by nearly 100% of Chinese. Therefore, this paper believes that Xi’an official media has gradually increased the publicity of new media in 2019, 2020 and 2021, while closer to the living habits of tourists, and gradually pay attention to improving the attraction of Xi’an to tourists.
3.2. Xi’an Tourism Data
Figure 1 and Figure 2 clearly show that since 2017, the tourism volume and economic income of Xi’an tourism have both been on the rise. After the outbreak of Covid-19, the overall tourism industry has been impacted, and the number of
tourists and economic income plummeted, but after a one-year recovery period, it could be seen from Figure 1 and Figure 2 that the development of Xi’an tourism is gradually recovering, showing an upward trend.
Combined with Table 1 and Figure 1 & Figure 2, it could be clearly seen that with the transformation of the new media publicity direction of Xi’an culture and tourism Bureau to public habits, the number of tourists and tourism income in Xi’an also show the same development trend.
4. Main Impact
With highly developed Internet, there is no doubt that social media has become one of the most significant measures of publicity and marketing (Nian & Sundararajan, 2022). This paper holds that new media publicity has three main effects on the development of Xi’an Tourism: increasing the number of tourists, promoting the diversification of Xi’an tourism marketing and increasing the difficulty of crisis management.
4.1. Increasing the Number of Tourists
New media plays two main roles in the development of tourism: propaganda tourism destination and providing interactive communication platform (Ha et al., 2020; Mazilu, Sava, & Gheorgheci, 2016), which could increase the willingness of tourists to travel to the destination. Combined with Figure 1 & Figure 2, after the bowl throwing wine incident broke out on social media at the end of 2017, Xi’an tourists number increased explosively in a short time (Lei, Zhao, & Chen, 2020), which is due to the publicity of the characteristic culture of Xi’an bowl throwing wine by social media. Moreover, after the dissemination of Xi’an characteristic culture publicity video on the new media platform, Xi’an tourists’ number during the Spring Festival in 2018 increased by 66.56% compared with 2017, and the growth rate of tourism revenue was 66.56% (Xu, 2018). Therefore, this paper believes that the application of new media could impact Xi’an tourists’ number.
4.2. Promote Marketing Diversification
New media develops rapidly and spreads fast. The use of new media for product marketing has become popular (Li et al., 2021). After 2018, many cities in China have carried out urban characteristic publicity on the new media platform, and net-red city have emerged on the Internet. Meantime, the number of tourists and tourism revenue of these net-red cities have increased significantly (Deng et al., 2018). Many tourist attractions and hotels take advantage of the opportunity to carry it out marketing on the new media platform. Additionally, due to the development and application of new media, the tourism theme integrates scientific and technological elements and artistic elements into the tourism experience and publicity process, which promotes the diversified development of tourism marketing (Liu & Li, 2018).
4.3. Increasing the Difficulty of Crisis Management
A tourism crisis is any event that may threaten the normal operation of tourism-related businesses or tourism destinations’ development (Xie et al., 2022). The characteristics of new media are that it is interactive and disseminated (Gao, 2015), everyone could express their own opinions, which will cause bad news to be publicized quickly by new media often increase the difficulty of crisis management. Tourists are the main participants in the development of tourism, and tourists often express their feelings online in the process of tourism, which is the starting point of social public opinion. The impact of online public opinion on the tourism industry is divided into positive and negative aspects. The positive impact will bring higher tourism income and a large number of tourists to the local area. However, the spread of negative effects on the Internet will reduce the credibility of tourism destinations, thus reducing the idea of tourists to travel here, which greatly increases the difficulty of tourism destinations in managing crisis events. For example, Xi’an tourists number was declined, since the new of the Terracotta Warriors was disseminated through new media. In conclusion, this paper believes that the application of new media has increased the difficulty of Xi’an tourism crisis management.
5. Conclusion
According to Xi’an’s tourism figure analysis and Xi’an’s tourism literature analysis, this paper believes that the application of new media in Xi’an’s tourism development has gradually matured, and the impact is more obvious. With the rapid development of information network technology, the application of new media in the tourism market has become more and more extensive. Meanwhile, Xi’an Culture and Tourism Bureau has followed the trend of the public and adopted mainstream new media to public Xi’an tourism, and achieved remarkable results: the combination of new media and tourism development in Xi’an has increased tourists number. In addition, the application of new media has promoted the diversification of tourism marketing in Xi’an. On the other hand, the application of new media will increase the difficulty of management of Xi’an tourism crisis.
At the same time, due to the limitation of the author’s energy and knowledge, the literature and data collection are not comprehensive enough, and all the influencing factors are not fully analyzed in the research process. There are some subjective views and opinions in the article.