We all love to travel in some way or the other, but have you ever thought of traveling virtually? It’s possible now. While you can’t transpire yourself physically, enjoying the beautiful landscapes from all different corners of the world is possible with the Metaverse.
The Metaverse is a new technology that has become the talk of the town lately and is set to revolutionize the tourism and hospitality industry. The technology can create an immersive experience in both virtual and physical environments and have the power to merge the physical and digital worlds, allowing users to move seamlessly between them.
What Is Metaverse In Tourism And Hospitality?
Metaverse combines augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and other immersive technologies to create an interactive and immersive environment for users. The power of Metaverse can revolutionize the tourism and hospitality industry by allowing tourists to get a glimpse of the places they want to visit.
Metaverse enables different tourist and hospitality applications to offer an immersive experience to customers to engage and interact with different locations.
By offering 3D features, these applications can help from enjoying the different landscapes to selecting their favorite hotel room. These applications are gaining more and more traction daily because they help tourists in decision-making, which adds value to the industry.
Seeing their popularity and benefits, leading companies in the travel and hospitality industry are looking forward to integrating virtual interfaces and booking solutions into their business.
The Split-Dalmatia County Tourist Board’s Tourism 3.0 is a perfect example of Metaverse in tourism. The project helps the company interact with customers and offer different travel deals and packages, making it seamless, interactive, and a more fun way to find travel destinations.
This is only one example. Other key players in the industry are looking to integrate 3D solutions into their business. Due to this surge in the popularity of Metaverse, experts have suspected the overall Asia Pacific tourism market revenue will expand at a rapid CAGR.Â
The Role Of Metaverse In the Tourism Industry
Metatuorism (Metaverse + tourism) is the new trend because it improves people’s communication and abates the backlogs in the tourism and hospitality industry.
Certainly! One potential example of how the metaverse can impact travel and tourism is through virtual destination experiences. In the metaverse, users can visit virtual replicas of real-world tourist destinations, allowing them to explore and interact with these locations from the comfort of their own homes.
For instance, imagine a traveler interested in visiting the pyramids of Egypt. Instead of physically traveling to Egypt, they can enter the metaverse and immerse themselves in a highly realistic virtual replica of the pyramids. They can virtually walk around, learn about the history and significance of the site, and even engage in interactive activities like solving puzzles or participating in virtual guided tours.
This not only provides a convenient and accessible way for individuals to explore destinations they may not have the opportunity to visit physically, but it also opens up new possibilities for education, cultural exchange, and exploration. The metaverse can facilitate connections between travelers from different parts of the world, creating a global community of virtual tourists who can learn, share, and collaborate within these immersive virtual environments.
Moreover, businesses in the tourism industry can leverage the metaverse to enhance their offerings. Hotels and resorts, for example, can create virtual experiences that allow potential guests to virtually explore their accommodations, facilities, and surrounding attractions before making a booking. This immersive preview can help travelers make more informed decisions and enhance their overall booking experience.
Overall, the metaverse has the potential to revolutionize the travel and tourism industry by offering virtual destination experiences, fostering global connections, and providing innovative marketing and booking solutions.
It Eliminates The Traveling Restrictions
The combination of AR and VR technology eliminates travel restrictions. People can travel using Metaverse without being restricted by physical boundaries.Â
Also, it gives freedom to put on whatever they want, so anyone can travel to another location without adhering to that place’s local dress code.
Also, with Metaverse, employment in both industries can be easy, seamless, and engaging. Tourism and hospitality industries can employ skilled employees from different locations.
They can come together in a shared virtual workspace and attend meetings. This way, tourism businesses can hire employees in foreign countries to expand their business and incarnate cultural versatility in their teams.
Help Travelers To Make Faster Decisions
The Metaverse is a great platform for tour operators, hospitality companies, and transportation services to showcase their offerings in an immersive and interactive way.
They can use Metaverse to operate virtual Showcases where tour operators can create virtual representations of their tour packages, allowing potential travelers to explore destinations, attractions, and activities virtually.
Similarly, hospitality companies can make use of the Metaverse to provide virtual experiences of their accommodations. Visitors can visualize the overall ambiance by virtually walking through hotel rooms and exploring amenities.
Overall, the immersive preview can assist potential guests in making informed decisions about booking their stay and traveling destinations.
Enhanced Booking Experience
Tour operators, hospitality companies, and transportation services can showcase their offerings and make booking easier for potential customers using the Metaverse.
Developing 3D applications can also give customers a better understanding of what to expect from facilities, services, and overall experiences before booking.
Also, seeing the preview, travelers can ask questions about their concerts before booking. By bridging the gap between imagination and reality, the Metaverse enhances customer confidence and satisfaction. Ultimately, it will increase the likelihood of bookings in the tourism and hospitality industry.
Improved Sales Volume
Limited travel restrictions, enhanced bookings, and faster consumer decisions will add up to increasing the sales volume for a business. Using the virtual experience of a business, people can explore the products or services across borders.
Also, the business can develop 3D apps to reach a larger audience. Booking platforms make up the perfect example of it. These platforms in the Metaverse can also simplify reservations increasing customer satisfaction and conversion rates and leading to more sales and business growth.
Top 5 Famous Metaverse Tourism Examples
We have yet to see the widespread use of the Metaverse. However, we already have these great metaverse tourism examples, where businesses have combined the tourism industry technology with the immersive experiences of the Metaverse to achieve their objectives.
Metaverse Seoul
Metaverse Seoul, a project from the Seoul Metropolitan Government, aims to create a virtual replica of a real-life city. The project still needs to be finished.
It is expected to be finished by 2026. But, soon after its announcement, the project became one of the highly anticipated projects of the Metaverse tourism industry.
While the project is still developing, users can create avatars and interact in several ways. For example, they can visit youth centers for counseling or tax offices for financial advice.
The government wants this project to provide a safe and inclusive space for Korea’s tourists to interact, communicate, seek help, and explore the city without fear of discrimination.
Emirates
Emirates is one of the famous players in the tourism industry. It has combined the power of virtual power and a dynamic website to give the users a 360-degree virtual tour of the cabin of an Emirates aircraft. It also has created its own VR app.
Users can use this VR app to explore the interiors of Airbus A380 and Boeing 777 aircraft. Customers can even better understand their seats through an interactive 3D seat map and book their preferred seats from within a virtual environment.
QVerse
Another great player in the tourism industry is Qatar Airways. It has been exploring metaverse tourism and has achieved great success.
They have developed a virtual reality experience called QVerse, powered by Unreal Engine. Using the Qverse, they have decided to provide their website visitors with a virtual tour of the Business Class and Economy Class cabins to create a more immersive experience.Â
Taking the concept further, they also offer guided tours hosted by a digital cabin crew, who take users through the virtual experience.
This cabin crew or 3D human model explains the key features onboard, providing a unique interaction and immersion level not seen in other VR airline experiences.
Coachellaverse
Coachella is the heaven of the musicians. Recently it has made headlines. No, we are not talking about the Blackping opening Coachella. We are talking about the CoachellaVerse. Coachellaverse is a digital experience platform to enable people unable to attend the event in person. Using it, people can participate from the comfort of their homes.
It also allows the users to interact with various aspects of the festival. The platform has greatly influenced Coachella tourism with its ability to provide a real-time experience of live performances from music artists.
Rendezverse
Rendezverse is a platform that focuses on metaverse tourism and hospitality. Allowing hotels and event companies to create a virtual space for events and conferences replicates the experience of holding them in person.
Tourists can join and explore this digital version of a property populated by their avatars. They can also save the meetings in recordings for future analysis and improvement of future events.
So, Is Metaverse The Future Of The Tourism And Travel Industry?
The Metaverse holds great potential to revolutionize the tourism and travel industry in the future. With the right technologies, Metaverse and tourism can go hand in hand. We can expect consumers to experience immersive traveling and exploring virtual destinations with their VR glasses.
They might no longer need a guide. Because 3D applications often have features to guide them to pick the right destination for their next traveling spot.
Till now, we have seen very limited implementation of the Metaverse. It may be because of its new technology, or the VR and Metaverse are both different technologies.
However, we can make smaller predictions. Metaverse tourism will majorly focus on virtual experiences. On the other hand, VR will impact areas like virtual booking engines.
To become a full-fledged technology, the Metaverse must overcome certain issues related to the tourist and hospitality industry. For example, Metaverse in travel and tourism solutions may not yet be able to update customers regarding the weather conditions.
Adopting a Metaverse in tourism industry also faces obstacles due to health concerns among travelers and consumers. Both factors can affect the adoption of metaverse technology in different countries.
However, these solutions are not something that cannot be overcome. With the right combination of technology or even real-world practices, Metaverse developers can get rid of these issues.
Overall, we can say that Metaverse will become a dominating factor in tourism and hospitality in the future. There are already successful examples of its implementation, and more businesses are focusing on the Metaverse for tourism! Thank you for reading this guide. We hope you have liked it!
