Reshaping Travel: The Impact of Virtual Reality on Tourism

Virtual Reality (VR) creates artificial environments to simulate experience and give users the illusion of presence. Users interact with these virtual worlds using headsets that simulate sight, sound, touch and other senses.

XR technology can create novel, immersive spaces where people gather – such as in multiplayer online games. It can also recreate real-life experiences.

1. Immersive Experiences

Immersive experiences can inspire travel and broaden awareness of lesser-known destinations, from pre-trip “dreamer” stages to on-site visits. Augmented reality apps may assist with tour guidance in unfamiliar locales while virtual reality images and videos offer travellers an immersive experience of their destination.

Immersive experiences not only facilitate cultural exchange, but can also induce positive emotions such as pride. According to emotion appraisal theory, this feeling can positively influence prosocial behaviour and contribute to sustainable tourism development (Guttentag 2010).

AR and VR applications are now being widely utilized across a wide variety of tourism areas such as tours, navigation, marketing, education, heritage preservation, entertainment, accessibility and accessibility. Some examples include museum guides that incorporate AR technology; personalising tourist information to age-specific tourists; providing virtual experiences in travel agencies. Unfortunately, less research has been conducted on spatial marking; an immersive technology which overlays digital objects in the real world without using triggers; this method should become widespread use over time.

2. Immersive Learning

Virtual reality (VR) provides users with access to new environments, activities and emotions within an immersive simulated experience, without needing to physically travel. As such, VR may have profound impacts on tourism in various ways.

Virtual reality (VR) technology can be utilized to promote destinations, provide immersive experiences, and facilitate pre-trip decision-making processes. VR also serves to enhance existing tourists’ experiences as well as attract new tourists while teaching students more about foreign cultures in an accessible manner.

VR can also help promote cultural dissemination behavior intentions by providing tourists with an interactive learning experience about local culture. This is essential, as it helps tourists appreciate and respect a destination’s culture more deeply, increasing pride in it while developing emotional ties to that location by showing its history, development and evolution through VR.

3. Interactive Entertainment

Interactive entertainment is a rapidly emerging global industry. From Pokemon Go and League of Legends to Netflix’s Bandersnatch, interactive entertainment will have significant impacts on global economies in terms of revenue generation; already surpassing music and print media in revenue terms; it may soon overtake film and video game as the leading global industry.

Virtual reality (VR) offers users an immersive experience that enables them to explore a scene in 360 degrees via VR headset. VR has been proven to enhance travel destinations such as museums, heritage sites and beaches by amplifying flow while simultaneously increasing satisfaction and attachment with each destination.

This study explores the effects of virtual reality (VR) on impulse buying by applying both the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) framework and Theory of Continual Reinforcement (TRIZ). Results demonstrate that interactivity can have a positive effect on impulse purchasing; moreover, pride serves as a mediator in this interaction between VR and impulse spending.

4. Immersive Training

VR can be an invaluable asset in promoting tourism destinations, providing visitors with an immersive virtual reality experience of their destination. VR has already proven useful in numerous tourism fields including navigation systems, destination marketing campaigns, heritage preservation efforts and entertainment productions.

VR videos of tourist attractions can be watched on mobile phones or tablets using special viewer applications, making it easier for prospective tourists to experience and learn about destinations. VR can also be used for training employees within hospitality industries – for instance training housekeeping staff on how to effectively clean rooms and assist guests.

This paper’s purpose is to explore the effects of virtual reality on pre-trip dreamer tourism, which includes desire to travel and learn about various cultures. We employed a moderated mediation model to determine whether VR experiential value triggers cultural dissemination behavior intentions of tourists. Our results indicate that VR experiential value does indeed positively influence tourist’s cultural dissemination behavior intentions through pride mediation, making this an important finding for VR developers and museum organizers when creating immersive virtual reality content.

5. Interactive Marketing

Virtual reality (VR) can be an effective tool in marketing tourism destinations, giving travelers an intimate glimpse of its main attractions prior to booking their trip and helping them make informed decisions about which destination may best meet their travel needs.

Virtual reality (VR) can also play an essential role in encouraging tourism sustainability. VR can be used to showcase historical sites at risk from overtourism, or it can encourage travelers to travel responsibly by showing them what the local culture really looks like.

VR technology is constantly developing and becoming more advanced, potentially even replacing in-person travel entirely in the future. This could be particularly advantageous for seniors unable to afford travel who could experience desirable destinations through virtual reality without physically traveling there themselves. VR would also prove useful for people unable to travel due to illness or injury – such as creating a VR video of scenic hiking for someone injured who cannot physically participate.