Global sustainability transitions and the rise of emerging technologies present both threats and opportunities for tourism organisations to navigate. Yet no framework currently exists that provides guidance on how to identify the value of emerging technologies for specific tourism offerings, and how to design, implement, and evaluate the effectiveness of technology integration. This topic is explored through a case study of the integration of social virtual reality (VR) and digital twin technologies to develop an alternative to face-to-face conference offering in response to demands to reduce conference air travel and the associated CO2 emissions. The study, which takes a participatory action approach, comprises three ground-breaking social VR conferences, evolving from a small research pilot (GRONEN2020) to a non-academic conference (Circular Fashion Summit, Paris Fashion Week 2020) to a hybrid social VR, Zoom, and in-person session (SIGGRAPH Frontiers 2020). These events evidence the first known application of the integration of a building digital twin within a social VR platform for conferences. Integrating project findings and relevant literature, we propose the Technology-Enabled Sustainable Tourism Offering Framework, a dynamic framework that builds on Kolb’s Experiential Learning Theory to guide the implementation of emerging technologies for tourism offerings, and contribute timely theoretical insights.
Meath et al. (Sun,) studied this question.