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An Exploratory Analysis of Travel-Related WeChat Mini Program Usage: Affordance Theory Perspective

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Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2019

Abstract

A WeChat mini program is an application that users can use without downloading and installing. After it was officially released in 2017, many travel enterprises have launched their own mini programs. This study applies affordance theory to investigate the role of WeChat mini programs in tourism activities through social network analysis using Rstudio. The authors searched for the topic “how do you perceive travel related WeChat mini program”, 200 comments were crawled and 180 comments were analysed after data cleaning. Results show that travel-related WeChat mini programs play a very important role in Chinese social network tourism activities. Moreover, the results suggest how the affordance theory has to be applied to the usage of WeChat mini programs.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2016S1A3A2925146).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Hotel and Tourism Management, Kyung Hee University, Seoul, South Korea

    Ao Cheng & Chulmo Koo

  2. College of Business Administration, Pusan National University, Busan, South Korea

    Gang Ren & Taeho Hong

  3. Department of Marketing and Information Systems, School of Business Administration, American University of Sharjah, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

    Kichan Nam

Authors
  1. Ao Cheng
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  2. Gang Ren
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  3. Taeho Hong
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  4. Kichan Nam
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  5. Chulmo Koo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chulmo Koo .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Business School, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, Finland

    Juho Pesonen

  2. Faculty of Informatics, TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Julia Neidhardt

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Cheng, A., Ren, G., Hong, T., Nam, K., Koo, C. (2019). An Exploratory Analysis of Travel-Related WeChat Mini Program Usage: Affordance Theory Perspective. In: Pesonen, J., Neidhardt, J. (eds) Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2019. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05940-8_26

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