Asia pacific journal of information systems

The Korea Society of Management Information Systems (한국경영정보학회)
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The WeChat Mini Program for Smart Tourism

  • Ao Cheng (College of Hotel and Tourism Management, Kyung Hee University) ;
  • Gang Ren (School of Business Administration, Kookmin University) ;
  • Taeho Hong (College of Business Administration, Pusan National University) ;
  • Chulmo Koo (College of Hotel and Tourism Management, Kyung Hee University)
  • Received : 2019.03.14
  • Accepted : 2019.08.29
  • Published : 2019.09.30
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Abstract

The WeChat mini program is an application embedded in WeChat that users can use without downloading and installing. After it was officially released in 2017, many travel enterprises have launched their own mini programs on the WeChat platform. This study applies affordance theory to investigate the WeChat mini program's role in tourism activities through social network analysis using the R programming language. The authors searched the topic of "how do you perceive the travel-related WeChat mini program" and then crawled the 200 comments found; 180 comments were analyzed after data cleansing. The results show that travel-related WeChat mini programs play a very important role in Chinese social network tourism activities. This paper found that WeChat played a more active role in various tourism-related interactions with Chinese social networks. Moreover, the results show how affordance theory is applied to the use of WeChat mini programs.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

1. This work was supported by LG Yonam Foundation (of Korea). 2. This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea Grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2014S1A2A2028351).

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