Metaverse Tourism: Opportunities, AI-Driven Marketing, and Ethical Challenges in Virtual Travel

Definition

Metaverse tourism refers to the application of immersive digital technologies—such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and blockchain—within tourism experiences. It enables users to explore destinations, participate in cultural experiences, and interact socially within persistent, 3D virtual environments. While it offers new ways of experiencing tourism beyond physical boundaries, it also introduces novel ethical, technological, and social dilemmas. This entry is written as an encyclopedia entry rather than a systematic review or empirical study. It is intended as a conceptual and integrative overview of current knowledge and debates, informed by peer-reviewed research, industry reports, and illustrative case examples.

1. Introduction

The metaverse, a persistent, immersive, and interoperable network of 3D virtual spaces in which users interact via avatars and digital objects, has moved swiftly from science fiction to applied reality, reshaping sectors as diverse as gaming, education, healthcare, marketing, and, increasingly, tourism [1]. Within this emerging environment, travelers can engage with highly realistic, emotionally resonant simulations of destinations and cultural attractions without physical displacement [2,3]. Powered by converging technologies such as virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and advanced graphics engines, metaverse tourism creates dynamic, multi-sensory pathways for exploration, entertainment, learning, and even AI-driven marketing personalization [4]. Metaverse tourism should be understood as a digital extension of travel that is not equivalent to gaming or simple 2D virtual tours; it requires immersion, interactivity, and cultural or experiential framing [5,6].

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated interest in such contact-free digital experiences by disrupting global mobility and exposing the fragility of traditional tourism models [7]. Immersive previews of destinations, virtual museum walk-throughs, and gamified heritage quests now complement physical travel, granting access to audiences who face financial, health-related, or geopolitical constraints [8]. Scholars such as Go and Kang [9] further contend that metaverse tourism can advance sustainable tourism goals by reducing transport related carbon emissions and alleviating pressure on overtouristed heritage sites.

Yet the rapid diffusion of metaverse platforms brings complex ethical, regulatory, and socio-cultural questions to the fore. Issues of data privacy, algorithmic bias, digital exclusion, and cultural authenticity dominate current scholarly and policy debates [10,11]. As virtual environments grow more hyper-personalized—fueled by AI-driven marketing engines and monetized via non-fungible tokens (NFTs), branded skins, and digital avatars—questions of governance, equitable access, and community benefit become critical. Zaman et al. [12] warn that disparities in connectivity and digital literacy risk widening existing tourism inequalities, excluding entire demographics from next-generation travel experiences.

Consequently, the metaverse should be viewed not as a fleeting technological novelty but as a sociotechnical ecosystem requiring rigorous, multidisciplinary scrutiny. Its capacity to reconfigure destination management, visitor engagement, and tourism marketing is undeniable; so too are the attendant risks of commercial exploitation, cultural misrepresentation, and regulatory gaps.

This entry critically examines how metaverse tourism reshapes the tourism experience through immersive technologies, AI-driven personalization, and innovative governance models. It explores not only the opportunities for cultural access, environmental sustainability, and market innovation, but also the ethical and social dilemmas posed by hyper-personalization, data surveillance, and digital exclusion. Particular emphasis is placed on co-creation and smart tourism ecosystems—highlighting how user-generated content, decentralized governance, and open standards can democratize virtual tourism. The article also evaluates policy and regulatory frameworks necessary to guide responsible innovation, equity, and sustainability within this emerging sociotechnical landscape. This entry, therefore, offers a balanced examination of the opportunities, ethical dilemmas, and implementation challenges posed by the rise of metaverse tourism.

2. Metaverse as a Digital Extension of Tourism

The metaverse stretches tourism’s experiential frontier beyond physical space by fusing virtual environments with real-world cultural, social, and commercial systems. Destinations can now create digital high-fidelity, data-rich replicas of cities, heritage sites, and natural landscapes, allowing visitors to explore interactively and remotely. Such environments support experiential learning, cross-cultural appreciation, AI-driven marketing personalization, and always-on destination branding in ways that are increasingly multisensory, inclusive, and scalable. Importantly, the metaverse does not aim to replace physical travel but to augment, simulate, and sometimes substitute it, making tourism more equitable, customized, and potentially sustainable.

2.1. Immersive Experiences and Cultural Access

Metaverse platforms deliver real-time, fully immersive simulations through VR headsets, AR-enhanced mobile devices, haptic wearables, and AI-powered avatars. These technologies enable visitors to “walk” through the Colosseum, attend live-streamed jazz concerts in New Orleans, or join pottery classes in virtual Kyoto, all rendered with 360° video, spatial audio, and responsive world building [13]. Such experiences deepen emotional engagement and cultural appreciation. Ali et al. showed that avatar-guided, historically contextualized reconstructions significantly enhance users’ sense of presence and learning outcomes [14]. Recent pilots include Meta’s Horizon Worlds tourism showcases, the Louvre Museum’s virtual gallery tours, and the Virtual Singapore project [6,15,16].

Immersive tourism also fuels pre-travel imagination. Prospective travelers can visualize accommodation, test activities, and compare neighborhood vibes before booking, thereby influencing destination choice and expectation management [17]. During the COVID-19 pandemic, millions accessed virtual museums, such as the Louvre’s online gallery tours, demonstrating the potential of digital heritage to broaden participation for those facing economic, health, or geopolitical barriers [18].

Nevertheless, immersive design carries risks of cultural homogenization and misrepresentation. If virtual reconstructions are produced without local consultation, they may perpetuate reductive narratives or commodify sacred rituals. Hassan and Saleh caution that metaverse heritage must be co-created with indigenous stakeholders to safeguard authenticity and narrative accuracy [7]. Ethical design frameworks that mandate community engagement, transparent provenance, and revenue-sharing mechanisms are therefore essential.

2.2. Economic and Environmental Sustainability

Beyond cultural access, the metaverse presents notable economic and environmental dividends. Virtual tourism can reduce transport-related emissions and alleviate pressure on over-visited sites such as Venice or Machu Picchu by diverting a portion of demand to high-quality digital alternatives [19]. Recent studies further link sustainability practices in oenotourism and eco-labeling initiatives to climate adaptation, underlining the metaverse’s potential to complement responsible tourism transitions [20,21].

Economically, metaverse platforms open new monetization models. Destinations, museums, and SMEs can issue digital tickets for premium events, sell NFT-based collectibles, or host branded “pop-up” experiences that extend a physical attraction’s reach without substantial infrastructure investment [22]. AI-driven analytics further allow precise targeting and dynamic pricing—capabilities that traditional tourism often lacks.

The metaverse also lengthens the visitor relationship cycle. As Go and Kang note, travelers can engage with a destination in the discovery stage, augment their on-site stay with AR overlays, and relive memories post-trip via virtual reunions or loyalty quests [9]. From a management perspective, digital twins support crowd flow simulations, disaster preparedness drills, and carbon impact visualizations, helping planners make evidence-based decisions in real time [23].

Yet sustainability is not automatic. Large-scale Graphic Processing Units (GPU) rendering and blockchain authentication consume significant energy. Jones emphasizes that the carbon footprint of data centers must be mitigated through renewable power, efficient coding, and carbon offset protocols, lest virtual gains merely displace emissions [24]. Empirical estimates suggest that one hour of VR streaming consumes ~200–300 g of CO₂, lower than air travel but still non-negligible. NFT commercialization raises risks of speculative bubbles and inequality in access.

3. Ethical and Societal Implications

While metaverse tourism promises accessibility, sustainability, and deeper engagement, it simultaneously surfaces profound ethical and societal dilemmas. These span equity and digital inclusion, privacy and data governance, algorithmic fairness, cultural authenticity, and community benefit-sharing. As immersive tourism becomes more autonomous, data-intensive, and commercially driven, it is critical to interrogate how it may amplify existing inequalities, enable new surveillance modalities, or commodify culture.

3.1. Inclusivity and the Digital Divide

A frequently cited advantage of metaverse tourism is its potential to democratize access by removing physical, financial, or geopolitical barriers to travel. However, inclusivity remains contingent on material access (devices, bandwidth), skills (digital literacy), and usage opportunities—all of which are unevenly distributed across and within countries [12,25]. Rural residents, older adults, persons with disabilities, and users in low-income regions face disproportionate barriers, risking exclusion from next-generation digital travel experiences and invisibility in the data-driven planning models that inform metaverse content creation. Parallel concerns have been raised in hospitality contexts, where digital service innovations reveal gaps between environmentally responsible vs. non-green consumer groups [26].

Bridging this divide requires multi-level interventions: (i) infrastructure investments and universal broadband schemes; (ii) public–private partnerships providing subsidized hardware and connectivity; (iii) mobile-first, lightweight immersive applications that do not require expensive head-mounted displays; and (iv) community-based digital literacy programs that cultivate critical, safe, and creative engagement with immersive media [27,28]. Without such measures, metaverse tourism could reproduce, or even widen, structural inequalities under the guise of openness.

3.2. Privacy and Data Governance

Metaverse tourism environments are continuous data machines. Avatars, biometric sensors, eye-tracking, emotion recognition, voice capture, geospatial traces, and AI-driven recommendations generate rich psychographic and behavioral profiles that can be exploited for hyper-targeted marketing, dynamic pricing, or behavioral nudging [29]. These capabilities outstrip the assumptions of many legacy privacy frameworks. As Jobin et al. show, immersive AI systems challenge conventional notions of consent, transparency, and accountability by blurring public or private boundaries and amplifying information asymmetries [10].

Cross-border data flows further complicate compliance: users’ data may be collected, processed, and stored across multiple jurisdictions with divergent legal regimes. Embedding ethical AI principles such as data minimization, explainability, fairness, and contestability into platform design is therefore essential [11,30]. These issues are not hypothetical: GDPR and UNESCO frameworks are increasingly cited in tourism contexts, and several national boards have piloted compliance guidelines for immersive platforms. Concretely, this implies:

• Real-time, granular consent dashboards;
• Algorithmic transparency and third-party audits to detect and mitigate bias [31,32];
• Decentralized or self-sovereign identity (SSI) architectures to give users control over disclosure and reuse [33]; and
• Alignment with robust regulatory instruments such as the EU GDPR (2016/679), including rights to erasure, portability, and meaningful human oversight [34].

International soft-law instruments (UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of AI) can complement hard law by guiding sectoral codes for tourism and metaverse operators [35].

3.3. Cultural Authenticity and Representation

Cultural representation in virtual worlds is never neutral. Design choices determine which histories are told, whose voices are amplified, and how rituals are framed. Without participatory safeguards, metaverse reconstructions risk stereotyping, decontextualizing, or commodifying cultural heritage—what some scholars term digital colonialism [7,36]. Aesthetic optimization for engagement metrics can dilute contextual nuance, while gamification may trivialize sacred practices.

Mitigation requires co-creation and governance mechanisms that embed local and indigenous stakeholders throughout the lifecycle of virtual heritage projects—conceptualization, storytelling, IP ownership, monetization, and benefit sharing [37]. Revenue from NFT souvenirs, avatar-led heritage tours, or branded virtual festivals should flow back to source communities via transparent contracts. Beyond entertainment, metaverse tourism can serve pedagogical and diplomatic functions, cultivating intercultural understanding and “virtual diplomacy” through historically grounded, critically framed experiences [38]. Evidence shows tourism AI platforms can reproduce bias by over-representing popular destinations while marginalising minority cultures [39].

4. The Role of AI and Personalization

AI underpins nearly every functional layer of the metaverse, from procedural world building and real-time physics to avatar behaviour, linguistic translation, and adaptive storytelling. Within metaverse tourism, AI facilitates instantaneous interactivity, predictive decision making, and mass customization, allowing platforms to scale personalised services that would be impossible in traditional settings.

4.1. Hyper Personalisation and Adaptive Storytelling

By mining streams of behavioural, physiological, and contextual data—gaze direction, motion vectors, purchase history, sentiment cues—machine learning models dynamically tailor narrative pacing, visual density, and information depth. A virtual Pompeii tour, for instance, can elevate historical detail if the visitor slows near a mural or switches to a gamified quest if attention wanes. Such context-aware adaptation has been shown to heighten immersion, learning outcomes, and satisfaction [40,41].

Generative AI is further expanding creative possibilities: large language models craft real-time dialogue for non-player characters (NPCs); diffusion models render site-specific textures; and voice cloning tools deliver multilingual audio guides indistinguishable from local experts [10,42]. These advancements transform passive spectators into active co-authors of their journeys.

4.2. Conversational Agents and Emotion AI

AI-driven avatars—equipped with sentiment analysis, facial expression recognition, and reinforcement learning dialogue systems—act as empathetic digital concierges. They interpret micro expressions, adjust tone, and suggest context-appropriate next steps, creating an experience akin to a human guide yet available 24/7 and scalable to millions [43]. Such emotion-sensitive interfaces have been linked to stronger place attachment and purchase intent, illustrating AI’s marketing power within immersive travel. Comparable findings exist in physical service contexts, where self-service technology quality significantly influences novelty-seeking and revisit intention, highlighting cross-domain parallels [26].

4.3. Risks of AI Personalisation: Filter Bubbles, Manipulation, and Bias

Hyper-personalisation, however, can narrow serendipity. Recommendation engines may feed tourists only what aligns with inferred tastes, reinforcing cultural silos and limiting cross-cultural discovery [44]. Opaque algorithms also raise concerns about price discrimination, behavioural nudging, and exclusionary profiling—particularly when training data embed societal biases or underrepresent minority cultures [45].

4.4. Toward Explainable and Ethical AI

To harness AI benefits while mitigating harms, scholars advocate adopting explainable AI (XAI) frameworks and AI ethics by design. Key practices include:

• Transparent recommendation rationales—displaying why particular experiences are surfaced.
• User-controlled preference sliders—letting travellers widen or narrow content diversity.
• Fairness audits and bias impact assessments for datasets and model outputs [46].
• Federated or edge AI to minimise raw data sharing and enhance privacy resilience [47].

International best practice guidelines, from the IEEE P7003 standard for algorithmic bias considerations to UNESCO’s AI Ethics Recommendation, provide templates for tourism platforms to operationalise these safeguards within immersive environments [35].

5. Future Directions and Responsible Innovation

5.1. Smart Tourism and Co-Creation

Next-generation metaverse tourism will be underpinned by smart tourism ecosystems, interconnected networks of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, edge AI modules, 5 G/6 G connectivity, and data marketplaces that collectively optimise visitor flows, resource efficiency, and experiential quality [28]. When ported into immersive space, smart tourism logic extends to avatar-based crowd simulations, digital twin dashboards, and mixed reality command centres where planners, residents, and visitors co-design scenarios in real time [48].

At the heart of this shift is co-creation (Figure 1). Travellers no longer consume pre-packaged content; they shape it—crafting bespoke avatars, curating micro itineraries, or even “modding” entire districts on open-source platforms such as Roblox, Decentraland, or Spatial. Chen demonstrates that participatory building fosters psychological ownership, deeper engagement, and stronger place attachment in virtual destinations [49]. Recent hospitality research underscores that gamification and festival experiences can foster flow, inspiration, and revisit intentions—principles that directly apply to co-created virtual tourism ecosystems [50,51,52].

DMOs and tourism SMEs can leverage co-creation through:

• User-generated content (UGC) competitions that feed into seasonal VR festivals;
• Tokenised loyalty economies in which visitors earn blockchain-based rewards for contributing 3D assets, translations, or accessibility add-ons [53];
• Living lab “town hall” sessions held inside the metaverse, where locals, designers, and tourists vote—via smart contracts—on future digital twin enhancements [48].

Such models democratise innovation, align with inclusive citizenship values, and generate diversified revenue streams—from royalties on co-authored NFTs to dynamic in-world advertising tailored to visitor sentiment.

5.2. Ethical Governance and Standards

Immersive, real-time, and data-rich metaverse spaces expose regulatory gaps well beyond those posed by 2D social media. Key policy challenges include identity fraud, content moderation, IP fragmentation, cross-border data flows, and platform accountability. Presently, governance largely rests with private operators whose terms may diverge from international human rights norms. Scholars call for globally coordinated meta codes that anchor virtual tourism development to transparency, inclusivity, and sustainability benchmarks [10,19,54].

Emerging mechanisms include:

• Digital tourism charters such as voluntary compacts, signed by platform providers and DMOs, spelling out duties on accessibility, data ethics, cultural integrity, and carbon disclosure [55];
• DAOs that grant token-holding stakeholders proportional voting rights on rule changes, revenue allocation, and moderation appeals, thereby fostering community self-governance [56];
• Third-party certification labels, akin to ISO management standards, that audit virtual experience safety, authenticity, and disability compliance before public release [57].

To track progress, scholars propose metaverse-specific ESG metrics: server farm energy intensity (kWh/visitor hour), digital equity indices (device cost vs. median income), and algorithmic fairness scores (demographic parity in recommender outputs). These indicators can feed into mainstream sustainability reports, building the future of the metaverse (Figure 2), green bond prospectuses, and destination branding campaigns [58,59]. Example: A VR heritage site serving 10,000 visitor hours could report 2500 kWh use (0.25 kWh/visitor hour), benchmarked against renewable energy credits.

Key Considerations for Metaverse Tourism Analysis:

• Ensure GDPR compliance and data minimization: Immersive environments collect vast biometric and behavioral data. GDPR compliance ensures user trust, while minimization prevents unnecessary data harvesting. Without it, platforms risk legal penalties and reputational damage.
• Provide transparent AI explanations: Explainable AI builds user confidence in recommendations and pricing. Tourists should know why certain experiences are suggested, avoiding hidden biases or manipulation.
• Adopt renewable energy in server farms: VR/AR rendering and blockchain consume enormous energy. Shifting server infrastructure to renewables reduces carbon footprints and aligns metaverse tourism with sustainability goals.
• Include accessibility features for disabled and elderly travellers: Features like voice commands, haptic feedback, subtitles, and simplified interfaces expand participation. Accessibility ensures inclusivity and compliance with global tourism ethics.
• Avoid over-commercialization of heritage: Virtual heritage risks commodification if driven solely by profit. Safeguards must prevent sacred or cultural assets from being trivialized or distorted for entertainment.
• Engage local communities in co-creation: Involving locals ensures authenticity, equitable benefit-sharing, and protection against digital colonialism. It also builds community ownership of virtual destinations.
• Monitor NFT/blockchain sustainability: NFT-based ticketing or souvenirs carry risks of speculation and high energy costs. Monitoring ensures financial fairness and ecological responsibility.
• Develop moderation crisis protocols: Virtual worlds face risks of harassment, misinformation, or cultural misrepresentation. Platforms need clear moderation strategies to address crises quickly and fairly.
• Implement diversity/bias audits in recommender systems: AI-driven recommendations can marginalise minority cultures or reinforce stereotypes. Regular audits ensure cultural diversity and fairness in content exposure.
• Provide low-bandwidth XR modes for inclusion: Many users in developing regions lack high-speed internet or costly headsets. Lightweight, mobile-first XR versions broaden access and prevent digital divides.
• Link KPIs with UN SDGs: Aligning key performance indicators (KPIs) with the UN Sustainable Development Goals makes virtual tourism measurable against global sustainability standards (SDG 12 Responsible Consumption).
• Establish continuous governance feedback: Tourism platforms evolve rapidly. Feedback loops (DAO voting, community surveys) allow adaptive governance, ensuring that ethical principles keep pace with technological changes.

6. Limitations and Future Research

Future research should include mixed-method studies, user adoption surveys, policy analysis, and regulatory sandbox experiments.

While this entry offers a comprehensive conceptual overview of metaverse tourism, it is not without limitations. The analysis is primarily theoretical and integrative, drawing from multidisciplinary sources rather than empirical case studies. As such, its applicability may be constrained by the fast-changing nature of metaverse technologies, regional disparities in digital infrastructure, and the evolving maturity of regulatory frameworks in tourism.

One key limitation lies in the speculative nature of much of the existing research. Many current studies emphasize the potential benefits of immersive technologies without longitudinal evidence to support claims about sustained user engagement, economic impact, or environmental outcomes. This gap underscores the need for empirical evaluations of how metaverse tourism platforms influence visitor behavior, business performance, and destination sustainability over time.

Technological feasibility is also advancing more rapidly than ethical and governance practices. Although this entry discusses decentralized models such as DAOs and the promise of open standards, there is limited evidence on their successful implementation in tourism-specific contexts. Pilot studies, testbeds, and regulatory sandboxes remain underdeveloped, and their outcomes are poorly documented.

Moreover, the discourse on digital inclusion and accessibility tends to be normative rather than participatory. Research often highlights the risks of digital divides, yet few studies have incorporated the voices or experiences of marginalized user groups—including rural residents, older adults, or low-income communities—in the design and evaluation of virtual tourism systems. Future investigations would benefit from user-centered and co-creative methodologies that foreground equity and accessibility in immersive tourism experiences.

Environmental considerations also warrant deeper inquiry. While virtual travel is often touted as a more sustainable alternative, precise assessments of energy consumption—particularly for GPU rendering, blockchain transactions, and data center operations—are scarce. Life-cycle analyses of metaverse platforms could help validate sustainability claims and inform energy-efficient design.

Looking ahead, future research should explore real-world applications and user adoption through field studies, surveys, and experiments in various cultural and geographic contexts. Comparative policy analyses are needed to examine how data governance regulations, such as the EU’s GDPR or the AI Act, affect platform development and user trust. Bibliometric reviews highlight the emerging nexus between metaverse adoption, sustainability, and AI in tourism, suggesting that future research agendas should systematically map these intersections [60,61]. Longitudinal studies would help illuminate how hyper-personalization and algorithmic recommendation systems influence behavior, satisfaction, and the diversity of cultural exposure. Finally, the governance dimensions of the metaverse—particularly community-based models using smart contracts or token-based voting—deserve closer examination to determine their efficacy, legitimacy, and scalability in tourism ecosystems.

By addressing these gaps, researchers and practitioners can help shape a metaverse tourism landscape that is not only technologically advanced but also inclusive, ethical, and socially beneficial.

7. Conclusions

Metaverse tourism now occupies a strategic crossroads, since it offers an unprecedented leap in experiential, AI-enhanced travel while revealing a complex ethical landscape that demands careful governance. Immersive, personalised, and perpetually scalable environments can redefine how people discover places, cultures, and communities, supporting year-round destination marketing, inclusive access for mobility-constrained travellers, and new revenue models that decouple value creation from physical capacity limits [48,49]. Properly managed, this ecosystem can accelerate progress toward the UN SDGs by reducing carbon-intensive trips, distributing visitor flows more evenly, and stimulating creative economy opportunities for underrepresented regions [48].

Yet these benefits are counterbalanced by real and present risks. Digital divides threaten to widen, excluding communities without reliable broadband or costly Extended Reality (XR) hardware [41]. Hyper-personalised AI raises privacy, manipulation, and algorithmic bias concerns [43]. Cultural misrepresentation, Internet Protocol (IP) disputes, and environmental externalities from energy-hungry data centres further complicate the promise of “green” virtual travel [24,59].

Moving forward, researchers and practitioners should prioritise:

• Interoperability and open standards to prevent walled gardens and enable seamless tourist mobility across platforms [62].
• Ethics by design frameworks that integrate privacy-preserving computation, bias audits, and community consultation at every development stage [63].
• Inclusive infrastructure strategies, subsidised device programmes, low bandwidth XR modes, and digital literacy initiatives to ensure broad participation [28].
• Sustainability metrics specific to virtual environments (kWh/visitor hour, carbon intensity of blockchain transactions) and their integration into global tourism ESG reporting [59,64].
• Transdisciplinary collaboration among policymakers, technologists, tourism boards, heritage custodians, and civil society groups to co-create governance charters, DAO-based oversight models, and benefit sharing mechanisms [55,56].

In essence, the metaverse should be cultivated not merely as a commercial frontier but as a shared public value space that champions cultural authenticity, digital equity, and environmental stewardship. Achieving this vision will require rigorous scholarship, bold policy experimentation, and participatory innovation to ensure that the next era of tourism is inclusive, ethical, and resilient.