Future tourism trends: Virtual Reality based tourism utilizing Distributed Ledger Technologies.

Abstract

Tourism destinations are always seeking new and innovative ways to better market tourism offerings and increase tourism revenues. This paper seeks to highlight a future tourism marketing trend through the use of virtual environments (VE) backed by Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT’s) such as Blockchain. VE is the umbrella term referring to virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR), also known as merged reality. The virtual reality market is said to be the next frontier in digital marketing and in recent years the tourism industry has slowly taken advantage of developments in the virtual space. On the other hand, DLT’s such as Blockchain technology is bound to revolutionize and disrupt various business sectors such as the financial and supply chain management sectors, among many. An indicator of this is the number of Fortune 500 companies that are members of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance – an alliance that is seeking to build enterprise-grade software on the Ethereum Blockchain. The analysis suggest that VR based tourism utilizing DLT’s can positively impact the tourism industry and provide a means for additional revenue.