Abstract
Virtual reality has become a more common phenomenon in both destination marketing and on-site experience. The recent challenges such as overtourism and the COVID-19 pandemic have created a pressing need to examine virtual tourism as an alternative to traditional travel. This conceptual article aims at clarifying virtual experience in tourism, discussing the main antecedents and outcomes of virtual experience, and proposing a conceptual model of virtual tourism experience. The review of the literature revealed that virtual experience in tourism is influenced by factors related to information, quality, technology acceptance, and affective involvement and has significant effects on tourists’ attitudes and behavioral intentions. This paper contributes to knowledge and practice by classifying the main groups of factors influencing virtual tourism experience, introducing the conceptual model, discussing opportunities for future research, and providing recommendations for tourism practitioners.
Highlights
Virtual reality (VR) has become increasingly more popular in the gaming, movie, and theme park industries
Despite the long-term association of tourism with physical location and authenticity, VR was being applied to tourism contexts even pre-pandemic along with other contemporary strategies such as augmented reality (AR), 3D virtual worlds, immersive media, and gamification [1]
Sites utilize technologies as strategic business decisions because virtual tourism has been an effective tool in evoking emotion and visit intention towards the real place [6,7,8]
Summary
Virtual reality (VR) has become increasingly more popular in the gaming, movie, and theme park industries. VR has been utilized most frequently for marketing to illustrate a place and project a destination image to potential visitors [2,3,4] Technologies such as 3D virtual worlds and VR are revolutionizing the way people experience travel and tourism-related products [5]. The primary barriers likely to hinder tourism recovery include, among others, the closing of international borders, international travel bans, bankruptcies of tourism providers, and tourists’ risk perceptions [24,25,26] In this period of “forced hibernation”, there is a need to develop new services that allow for safe travel experiences, which AR and VR strategies are effective at [27]. Understanding perceptions of VR in the tourism context will allow scholars and practitioners to grasp the macro view of these technologies and assess the directions that sites should develop into considering the pandemic and other challenges facing the global industry
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