iClick Interactive Asia Group Limited, an independent online marketing and enterprise data solutions provider in China, announced the launch of a new recommendation management platform for culture and tourism content, jointly developed by iClick and Tencent Culture and Tourism.

The new platform leverages Tencent Culture and Tourism’s strong data capabilities and iClick’s rich content resources and data tracking expertise, to provide operators of domestic tourist attractions in China with a rich array of features including customer preference analysis and ranked selections of recommended travel content. The information and features provided by the platform will help iClick’s travel industry clients improve operating efficiency, manage content resources, enhance the popularity of their business and increase consumer conversion rate.

This SaaS platform integrates multiple capabilities such as multi-terminal data collection, real-time user behavior analysis and user profiling to create a map of user needs and content preferences, helping tourist site operators optimize their content marketing strategies by choosing the most appropriate type of content for their target demographic.

Data predictions from the Chinese Tourism Academy (CTA) indicate that the COVID-19 outbreak has had a dramatically negative impact on China’s tourism industry. CTA projections show that the overall numbers of Chinese domestic tourists in the first quarter of 2020 dropped 56%, with overall income from tourism dropping 69% compared with the same period of last year. The CTA also predicts that 932 million fewer Chinese will make domestic trips this year, and that overall income from domestic tourism in China will drop by RMB 1.18 trillion. Despite this, Dai Bin, director at the CTA has stated that the market fundamentals of China’s domestic tourism market have not changed, and there is a strong possibility of a rebound in domestic tourism spending.