RESEARCH ON THE INFLUENCE MECHANISM OF WeChat TRAVEL PRODUCTS SHARING ON POTENTIAL TOURISTS’ TRAVEL INTENTION

Abstract

In China, WeChat has become an excellent place for Chinese tourists to share their travel products and experiences nowadays due to its wide audience, high usage rate, and immediacy. According to the 49th Statistical Report on the Development of the Internet in China, as of December 2021, the number of social media users in China reached 1.007 billion, accounting for 97.5% of the overall number of Internet users. 43.8% of users use WeChat to “share their lives or opinions”, indicating that WeChat is currently the most widely used and most representative Chinese social media in China. With the advent of the 5G era, WeChat and the products on its platform will further unleash the social value of WeChat, and the value it holds for the development and expansion of the travel market should not be underestimated. Several investigations have shown that the majority of adults are keen to travel to a destination because they are inspired by the travel products and other related content shared by their friends on social media, with a large proportion deciding to travel for reasons of benign envy (Yang Yi, 2020; Liu et al., 2018). Yet, few people know how the role of benign envy can drive travel intention, particularly in terms of intention to visit a tourist destination previously mentioned by WeChat friends. Meanwhile, the relationship between different types of travel product sharing on WeChat and travel intention has not been rigorously examined in research. To fill this research gap, this study aims to conduct an empirical investigation to attest to the travel product sharing-travel intention link. Specially, we investigate whether sharing travel products on WeChat can drive an individual’s destination travel intention through benign envy and how such benign envy can be triggered on social media.