15. Metaverse Tourism, Future Trends, and Sustainable Tourism Development

The technological advancements tend to bring about convenience, transparency, and efficiency in the operations. The internet has democratized access to information by making a vast amount of reference material readily available online. Furthermore, the increased speed in internet connectivity brought about digitalization. Technologies like big data analytics, innovative programming and coding as well as artificial intelligence paved the way for the emergence of Virtual reality and Augmented reality in the second decade of the twenty-first century. With unexpected events like pandemic such as COVID-19 insisted the restriction in movement of the people and the usage of inventions like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, big data analytics, and augmented reality promoted the trend of immersive experience to choose a specific tourism destination and gives the liberty to potential tourist the convenience of choosing a particular destination along with benefitting the host society by attracting more tourists. This form of tourism also provides a solution for sustainable tourism by means of balancing the management of tourists on physical and virtual mode. The study aims to find out and elaborate on the evolution of Metaverse Tourism and the future trends by reviewing and analyzing the available information in secondary form alone by adopting the PRISMA Framework for collecting, analyzing the data, and presenting the discussions. It also puts efforts to find an alignment between sustainable tourism development and impacts of metaverse in Tourism Industry. The findings provide intriguing insights for stakeholders like service providers, tourists and administrators, and policy makers in tourism industry.