The Role of Virtual Travel Affordance During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual tourism is drawing more and more attention from both practitioners and researchers. Past research about virtual tourism mainly focused on either the differences between this new type of tourism and other types of tourism or tourists’ attitudes and behavioral intentions towards virtual tourism. However, it remains unclear how the specific designs or features of virtual travel influence tourists’ attitudes and participation intentions. Therefore, based on the affordance theory and self-determination theory, this research adopts the mix-method study design to identify four virtual travel affordances, namely sentience, social, identity, and self-expression affordances, and to explore how these four affordances could satisfy tourists’ autonomy, competence, and relatedness needs, which could consequently influence tourists’ continued use intention and word-of-mouth intention. Moreover, this research also investigates how the COVID-19 pandemic affected tourists’ preference for virtual travel, which previous research paid rare attention to