Post-COVID impact of offering free virtual tours during the pandemic: navigating the interplay of cannibalisation and visitors’ crowd aversion

ABSTRACT

The tourism sector embraced virtual tourism as an innovative revitalisation strategy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Building on existing literature exploring the long-term impacts of virtual tours post-COVID, this paper examines whether and how offering free virtual tours during the pandemic enhances tourism performance in the aftermath. The study addresses the dual challenges of virtual tour cannibalisation and visitors’ crowd aversion, particularly relevant given the resurgence of congestion in popular destinations post-pandemic. Through mathematical modelling and analytical analysis, the study explores optimal pricing strategies for tour providers, emphasising the importance of bolstering social influence and mitigating visitors’ crowd aversion to physical visits. It underscores the post-COVID benefits of providing free virtual tours during the pandemic for tourism performance, particularly when visitors exhibit heightened crowd aversion. This strategy remains relevant with an endogenised virtual tour design or the presence of the reference point effect, highlighting the pivotal role of leveraging visitors’ reference points in enhancing tourism performance.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism performance
• virtual tour‌
• crowd aversion
• social influence‌
• reference point effect

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/05/covid-19-travel-tourism-virtual-reality/.

2 https://www.forbes.com/sites/geoffwhitmore/2023/10/11/what-is-revenge-travel-and-is-it-still-happening.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Natural Science Foundation of Sichuan Province [grant number 2022NSFSC0540].