Factors That Influence Virtual Tourism Holistic Image: The Moderating Role of Sense of Presence

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically restricted domestic and foreign travel; thus, virtual tourism has become a new option for traveling. As regards virtual tourism, the present study seeks to investigate the effect of tourist involvement on the three components of holistic image, namely cognitive, affective, and conative images; the influence of cognitive, affective, and conative images on the construction of the holistic image; and the moderating effect of sense of presence on the relationships between cognitive, affective, and conative images on the holistic image. Prospective tourists were chosen as research subjects in the present study on non-immersive virtual reality (VR) tourism, or virtual tourism. Participants first watched the 360° VR tour video of AirPano. Afterward, they filled out an online questionnaire, of which 386 valid samples were collected for analyses. Results show that tourist involvement considerably affects cognitive, affective, and conative images, which significantly influence the holistic image. Furthermore, a sense of presence was found to positively moderate the relationships between (1) cognitive and holistic, (2) affective and holistic, and (3) conative and holistic images. These results may allow tourism marketing organizations to better understand how to strengthen the holistic image in the context of virtual tourism.

Identifying the Main Service Elements for Customer-Oriented Live Guided Virtual Tours

Virtual tourism allows people to see and experience the world without physically travelling to the destination. The objective of this study is to identify service elements critical to the development of customer-oriented live guided virtual tours. A total of three focus group discussions were conducted, with 4–5 participants in each group. All the participants were Japanese who had previously participated in live guided virtual tours. The data was analysed with qualitative content analysis, where an inductive approach was used. The findings reveal that the main expectations of the participants are related to experiencing the local culture and way of life, feeling of actually being in the destination (sense of connection), social interaction and active participation. These factors make the virtual tour feel realistic and attractive and the tourism businesses need especially to focus on these when designing virtual tours for example by providing ample opportunities for the virtual tour participants to discuss with each other and learn from each other. This study brings valuable insights into the virtual tours research from the customer perspective, especially in a non-Western context.

Virtual Tourism and Challenges in a Post-Pandemic Context

The role played by technologies of information and communication, ICT, has become increasingly important in the way of life of societies. As well as technologies to revolutionize or everyone's way of life, it also brings a sense of alertness to match. This chapter aims to present a reflection on the importance of virtual tourism in the pandemic scenario (new coronavirus) and the main challenges in the post-pandemic period. The tourist sector must continue to communicate with clients in order to retain them. In this way, several companies choose to enter into a partnership with digital influencers, seeing that they are presented as a link between the company and the customers. From an interdisciplinary perspective, the chapter presents contributions to marketing, (virtual) tourism, and pandemic management.

Virtual Reality

Virtual reality, also known as computer-based reality, is an advanced technology that has the capability to upsurge destination accessibility and to increase the popularity of lesser-known destinations. The objective of the current study is to understand the latest trends in virtual reality and to discover the future scope of implementation of virtual reality in the tourism industry across the world. The potential and the employment of virtual reality is not entirely understood and comprehended by many destinations. The present study identifies that there is a continuous development in popularity of virtual reality, and it is the need of the hour today. This disruptive technology has led to the phenomenon of virtual tourism, which gives people a preview and understanding of what they will experience if they visit a place physically. Virtual reality is becoming an outstanding way to showcase information and to gain relevant response from the tourists to enhance the services and overall tourist experience in the tourism destination.

Paradigm Change in Tourist Preferences Towards Evolving New Normal Tourism and Travel Trends

Tourism has been recognized as a delight for attraction, accommodation, culture, recreation, and more. The tourism industry has become a major source of revenue for many businesses and for nations as a whole as part of the service sector. The unusual outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic is the sole disruptive circumstance for the last several months. Due to the unprecedented situation, there is a chance for new travel trends to emerge in the nation. This chapter describes the emerging new normal tourism and travel trends like a staycation, wellness and spa tourism, virtual tourism, sustainable travel, eco-tourism, vaccine tourism, and also aims at finding tourist preferences of destinations from the new travel trends post pandemic. Travellers today would like to visit destinations consisting of nature protected regions, which are termed sustainable travel, to satisfy their ecotravel, money value, private space, social distance, security, accessibility, and cleanliness needs.

Virtual Tourism as Part of the Russian Language Classroom

This paper suggests that tourist web resources could successfully become part of the L2 class-room with the effect of reinforcing the students’ motivation and adding to their knowledge of the places in which the foreign language is spoken. We aim to show that such resources could be particularly useful if combined with a recently developed teaching methodology relying mainly on oral translation being principally based on work with texts. We suggest that a lecture would become far more exciting if presented in the form of a virtual tour. Such an experience offers not only the possibility to enjoy a virtual visit to new places, but also to learn a lot about them, while learning a foreign language at the same time.

Evaluation of the Virtual Economic Effect of Tourism Product Emotional Marketing Based on Virtual Reality

Rapid development of Internet technology has led to great changes in all fields of life. Tourism industry has also gone to the Internet with the change of the times. Regarding the application of Internet technology in tourism, in fact, virtual tourism products are directly used to promote economic development. Online tourism stores have all kinds of tourism information in the database, realize network roaming, provide convenient information services for both the supply and demand of tourism, and can realize the rapid and stable sustainable development of tourism. This article mainly studies the evaluation of the virtual economic effect of emotional marketing of tourism products based on virtual reality (VR), the meaning algorithm of VR, etc., analyzes the virtual economy of tourism products based on VR, and helps tourism enterprises to grasp the needs of tourism consumers more accurately, so as to design products and services that are more in line with the demands of tourism consumers, the process of ultimately improving the user value. This study mainly uses the VR method, VR platform eye map processing, VR eye map regional detection and feature extraction method, and VR tourism product emotional marketing related experiments, to study the evaluation of the virtual economic effect of tourism product emotional marketing based on VR. The economic performance information of the virtual tourism industry is equivalent to the amount of these indicators, and the impact of the comprehensive evaluation on the economic performance of virtual tourism is quite equal. The results show that from 2017 to 2020, the virtual economic revenue of VR tourism product emotional marketing increased from 50 million to 1 billion. However, people give more importance to the tourism experience brought by virtual tourism products, and the reasonable consumption structure of virtual tourism hinders the improvement of tourism economic benefits. To promote the rationalization of the consumption structure of virtual tourism, the basic industry of tourism consumption is developed and the necessary design and processing is increased, in order to increase the supply of tourism products and to enrich tourism consumption.

Augmented reality in the dynamic world of virtual tourism

The issue of virtual tourism penetrates the consciousness of many current explorers and visitors to interesting sites and local attractions. Is it really necessary to physically travel to the chosen location, sacrifice time, money and increase your carbon footprint? The article deals with the issue of creating an application using augmented reality for the presentation of 3D models of cultural monuments. The application is designed for mobile devices, on which museum visitors can view digital copies of selected objects of interest. They can also take a virtual tour of the museum through their mobile devices from the comfort of their home. The introductory part of the article describes surveying of shape and visual properties in situ using photogrammetry and laser scanning. The sequent chapters are an analysis of the creation of 3D models in real scale with photorealistic textures and their presentation in a mixed reality environment. In our case, we will specifically focus on the augmented reality application and its development in the Unity multiplatform game engine. The article aims to describe the development of a mobile marker-based AR application briefly, to demonstrate the possibilities of augmented reality and to indicate the potential benefits resulting from the integration of X-reality into our lives. Specifically, we will focus on the application of AR to cartographic works and the enrichment of the content of classical 2D map works and plans with virtually designed 3D models on their surface.