The WeChat Mini Program for Smart Tourism

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.