Exploring the future of travel: Unveiling tourist behavior and perceptions of metaverse travel through hybrid PLS-SEM...

This study examines the metaverse's potential to revolutionize the tourism industry by enhancing tourists' travel experiences. The term metaverse tourism is about to exploring immersive virtual travel experiences through digital environments. The metaverse offers interactive previews of destinations, thereby improving tourism planning and engagement. The primary aim is to investigate and evaluate the metaverse-tourism nexus by analyzing tourist engagement and behavioral intentions to utilize the metaverse for tourism purposes. The frameworks of the technology acceptance model and the planned behavior theory are combined to understand the tourism dynamics and tourist's behavior intention to engage with metaverse. The analysis was performed on the sample of the 329 students, by using the integrative PLS SEM and the ANN approach. The analysis highlights that social norms play a crucial role in shaping both perceived enjoyment and virtual environment perception within the metaverse. As the results showed that the both perceived enjoyment (β = 0.365) and Virtual experience perception (VEP) (β = 0.346) are significantly affected by the social norms and both of these Perceived enjoyment (β = 0.239) and Virtual experience perception (VEP) (β = 0.241) significantly influence the behavioral intention to use the metaverse. Furthermore, the virtual environment itself emerges as the key driver of tourists' behavioral intentions to engage with the metaverse for travel. The study highlights the significant impact of metaverse tourism on tourist engagement with metaverse, offering critical insights for tourism-Metaverse agencies to enhance their services.