WeChat, a Chinese multi-purpose messaging, social media, and mobile payment app, is an emerging social media platform that has been integrated into the daily lives of Chinese people, including travel. However, despite the growing proliferation of WeChat, surprisingly, little attention has been paid to the gratifications obtained by Chinese travelers when using WeChat in travel-related decision-making. Adopting (utilizing) the well ground concept of Uses and Gratifications theory (UGT), this exploratory work aims to address this void in prior literature and identify why and how Chinese young travelers use WeChat to make hotel choice decisions.Findings stemmed from the semi-structured interviews using a combination of purposive and snowball sampling approaches with eighteen WeChat users reveal that hotel choice decisions through WeChat are influenced by a combination of social, process, and content gratifications. As indicated in our findings, hotels in China should be aware of gratifications obtained by travelers in stimulating them to utilize WeChat in the hotel selection process. Further, our work contributes to extant UGT literature by emphasizing that it has specific relevance and should be given more prominence within tourism and hospitality, and social media literature.

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