The metaverse and the tourism industry: current perspective and research agenda

The Metaverse is expanding rapidly, and more and more businesses and consumers are at-tempting to comprehend its workings, possibilities, and criticalities. On the other hand, aca-demics, who began examining the phenomenon in 2006, when it had different characteristics from the current ones, have only recently resumed analyzing it. Therefore, the goal of this chapter is to examine the impacts, opportunities, and challenges that the metaverse presents to the tourism industry and, as a result, to identify future lines of research. To achieve the re-search objective, the authors present the first use cases for the different types of Metaverse (Lifelogging, Augmented Reality, Virtual Worlds, and Mirror Worlds) by companies operating in the tourism industry. The methodological approach is centered on a qualitative method based on multiple cases which seems to be the most suitable to analyze the state of imple-mentations of new technologies in a specific sector. To select the case studies, the authors adopted the multiple case method technique by selecting those that were most representa-tive. The results of the study, which is among the first to analyze the applications of the Metaverse in specific industries, outline the opportunities that the Metaverse can bring to the tourism industry and furnishes a basis for understanding the adoption of this technology and possible future developments.