Tripadvisor To Make Travel Decisions Easier Using Metaverse

The travel industry saw a jarring decline during the pandemic, however, the collapse is reversed now. People have resumed travel and the sector has regained its position in the market. Now, companies are advancing in the sector to try out new technologies. A recent example of this is the American travel company Tripadvisor which is entering the metaverse.

Visiting The Destination Before The Trip

Skift, a news website focused on travel, reported the news that the travel company may come up with a metaverse experience later this year. Tripadvisor’s Adam Ochman said, “Traveling around the world or traveling in your backyard or traveling across the country, whatever it might be, is one of the most expensive things that you can purchase without actually trying it beforehand.”

The initiative will allow users to visit popular destinations including but not limited to Dubai, New York, Paris, and more before booking trips. It will allow several people or travelers planning to go to certain places to make decisions beforehand. If they don’t like a place, they can simply choose not to go there.

Tripadvisor is joining hands with a metaverse and artificial intelligence (AI) company MeetKai for the initiative, which is also planning for a similar experience for the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA). As of now, details regarding how the Tripadvisor’s metaverse will look like are still unclear. However, it might include experiences like e-commerce, gaming, and social elements.

Metaverse does not hold a definition as of now but many see it as a mesh of interconnected virtual worlds. Some also believe that 2-D webpages on the Internet would be rediscovered as 3-D worlds. For instance, one does not need to scroll through retail company Amazon’s website as the user can simply roam around in its virtual world which once was simply a page on the Internet.

A study produced in June 2023 by the University of Illinois touched on the subject of how the metaverse can prove to be a boon for tourism. 

“The current study found that nature-based VR travel had an indirect positive effect on many of the participant’s environmental attitudes and behavioral intentions through the mediating roles of spatial presence and narrative engagement,” the document read. “In other words, feeling present in the virtual context and engaged with the virtual content resulted in the most significant positive impact. Therefore, nature-based VR travel may provide an avenue to make travel more sustainable and impactful.”

According to the report, the travel and tourism industry can damage the environment due to carbon emitting from transport but metaverse technologies like virtual reality (VR) can help offset them. According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) tourism recovered by almost 90 percent between January and September 2023 after the pandemic.

Steefan George is a crypto and blockchain enthusiast, with a remarkable grasp on market and technology. Having a graduate degree in computer science and an MBA in BFSI, he is an excellent technology writer at The Coin Republic. He is passionate about getting a billion of the human population onto Web3. His principle is to write like “explaining to a 6-year old”, so that a layman can learn the potential of, and get benefitted from this revolutionary technology.