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,

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.