Track Title: Impacts of Virtual Reality on Cultural and Heritage Tourism: Opportunities and Challenges for Marketing

Track Chairs:
Giacomo Del Chiappa (gdelchiappa@uniss.it), University of Sassari, Italy
Marco Pichierri (marco.pichierri@uniba.it), University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy

Background

In the past ten years, Virtual Reality (VR) has become one of the most revolutionary technologies across various industries. In tourism (e.g., Kieanwatana & Vongvit, 2024; Jiang & Phoong, 2023), it offers novel ways for tourists to engage with destinations and cultural experience from detailed 3D reconstructions of archaeological sites to interactive museum exhibits and virtual tours. Immersive (e.g., using headsets) and non-immersive (e.g., through computer screens or mobile devices) VR systems have redefined how heritage and culture can be experienced and consumed (e.g., Debailleaux et al., 2018; Guttentag, 2010; Trunfio et al., 2022). As tourism shifts toward more experience-driven and digitally mediated forms (cf. Dang & Nguyen, 2022), VR can play a key role in making cultural and heritage contents more accessible, engaging, and memorable.

Particularly in the domain of cultural and heritage tourism, VR is helping destinations and sites to overcome traditional barriers such as geographic distance, lack of infrastructure, or limited mobility among visitors (e.g., Atzeni et al., 2022). For instance, museums and heritage sites have adopted VR to complement physical visits, offering pre-visit engagement tools or post-visit memory reinforcement (e.g., Bachiller et al., 2023; Jung et al., 2016). These technologies not only allow users to travel without moving, but can also enhance emotional connection with places and storytelling effectiveness (e.g., Marasco, 2020), contributing to a heightened sense of presence and perceived authenticity (Flavián et al., 2024; Tussyadiah et al., 2018).

Despite the evidence that VR may enhance the overall quality of the tourism experience (e.g., González-Rodríguez et al., 2020), its actual integration and usage in the cultural and heritage sector remains relatively low, especially in contexts where financial, technological, or human resources are constrained. Even when the VR infrastructure is available, many tourists do not engage with the technology, either due to lack of familiarity, perceived complexity, or doubts about its added value (e.g., Coldham & Cook, 2017; Diszitinger et al., 2017). This calls for a better understanding of significant adoption barriers – both psychological and practical. While recent research has begun to explore the behavioral and experiential aspects of virtual tourism (e.g., Kim et al., 2020), further investigations are needed to unpack the specific motivations and expectations tourists face when interacting with VR in cultural and heritage contexts.

Nonetheless, recent research on VR is also focusing on the role of that virtual experience type  – whether immersive or non-immersive – may have in significantly affecting outcomes such as authenticity perception, satisfaction, memorability, and future visit intention (e.g., Atzeni et al., 2022; Zheng et al., 2022).

This Call for Papers aims to shed light on these issues by inviting scholar contributions that adopt a double-side perspective (i.e., supply and demand-side perspective) to better understand how visitors and organizations perceive, interact with, and are influenced by VR developments in the context of cultural and heritage tourism. We encourage both empirical and conceptual submissions that delve into the psychological, experiential, and socio-cultural dimensions of VR, as well as comparative analyses of immersive and non-immersive VR technologies.

Topics of Interest

We welcome contributions that address (but are not limited to) the following topics:

• Visitor motivations and barriers to adopt VR in cultural and heritage settings;
• Comparative studies of immersive vs. non-immersive VR applications;
• Dimensions and meaning of authenticity in a virtual-related tourism and cultural experience;
• Elements enhancing memorability of VR-based cultural and heritage experiences;
• Behavioral outcomes of VR use: satisfaction, engagement, and visit intention;
• Economic, ethical, and accessibility implications of VR in cultural and heritage tourism;
• User experience (UX) and design considerations for VR in cultural contexts;
• Cross-cultural perspectives on VR adoption in cultural and heritage tourism;
• Business models and organizational challenges for implementing VR in museums and heritage sites.

References

Atzeni, M., Del Chiappa, G., & Mei Pung, J. (2022). Enhancing visit intention in heritage tourism: The role of object‐based and existential authenticity in non‐immersive virtual reality heritage experiences. International Journal of Tourism Research, 24(2), 240-255.

Bachiller, C., Monzo, J. M., & Rey, B. (2023). Augmented and virtual reality to enhance the didactical experience of technological heritage museums. Applied Sciences, 13(6), 3539.

Coldham, G., & Cook, D. M. (2017, September). VR usability from elderly cohorts: Preparatory challenges in overcoming technology rejection. In 2017 National Information Technology Conference (NITC) (pp. 131-135). IEEE.

Dang, T. D., & Nguyen, M. T. (2023). Systematic review and research agenda for the tourism and hospitality sector: co-creation of customer value in the digital age. Future Business Journal, 9(1), 94.

Debailleux, L., Hismans, G., & Duroisin, N. (2018). Exploring cultural heritage using virtual reality. In Digital Cultural Heritage: Final Conference of the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Initial Training Network for Digital Cultural Heritage, ITN-DCH 2017, Olimje, Slovenia, May 23–25, 2017, Revised Selected Papers (pp. 289-303). Springer International Publishing.

Disztinger, P., Schlögl, S., & Groth, A. (2017). Technology acceptance of virtual reality for travel planning. In Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2017: Proceedings of the International Conference in Rome, Italy, January 24-26, 2017 (pp. 255-268). Springer International Publishing.

Flavián, C., Tussyadiah, I. P., & Orús, C. (2024). How immersive technologies are redefining the customer journey. Guest editorial. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 36(11), 3557-3565

González-Rodríguez, M. R., Díaz-Fernández, M. C., & Pino-Mejías, M. Á. (2020). The impact of virtual reality technology on tourists’ experience: a textual data analysis. Soft Computing, 24(18), 13879-13892.

Guttentag, D. A. (2010). Virtual reality: Applications and implications for tourism. Tourism Management, 31(5), 637-651.

Kieanwatana, K., & Vongvit, R. (2024). Virtual reality in tourism: The impact of virtual experiences and destination image on the travel intention. Results in Engineering, 24, 103650.

Kim, M. J., Lee, C. K., & Jung, T. (2020). Exploring consumer behavior in virtual reality tourism using an extended stimulus-organism-response model. Journal of Travel Research, 59(1), 69-89.

Jiang, C., & Phoong, S. W. (2023). A ten-year review analysis of the impact of digitization on tourism development (2012–2022). Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 10(1), 1-16.

Jung, T., tom Dieck, M. C., Lee, H., & Chung, N. (2016). Effects of virtual reality and augmented reality on visitor experiences in museum. In Information and communication technologies in tourism 2016: Proceedings of the international conference in Bilbao, Spain, February 2-5, 2016 (pp. 621-635). Springer International Publishing.

Marasco, A. (2020). Beyond virtual cultural tourism: History-living experiences with cinematic virtual reality. Tourism and Heritage Journal, 2, 1-16.

Trunfio, M., Lucia, M. D., Campana, S., & Magnelli, A. (2022). Innovating the cultural heritage museum service model through virtual reality and augmented reality: The effects on the overall visitor experience and satisfaction. Journal of Heritage Tourism, 17(1), 1-19.

Tussyadiah, I. P., Wang, D., Jung, T. H., & Tom Dieck, M. C. (2018). Virtual reality, presence, and attitude change: Empirical evidence from tourism. Tourism Management, 66, 140-154.

Zheng, C., Chen, Z., Zhang, Y., & Guo, Y. (2022). Does vivid imagination deter visitation? The role of mental imagery processing in virtual tourism on tourists’ behavior. Journal of Travel Research, 61(7), 1528-1541.

Please submit your abstract HERE