A Bibliometric Mapping of Metaverse-Based Tourism and Destination Marketing

The ongoing evolution of immersive technologies has rocketed, placing the metaverse as a new groundbreaking tool in the tourism domain. This study gives a bibliometric analysis onto the literature dedicated to metaverse tourism to identify publication patterns, influential authors, dominant journals, citation trends, and the very foundations of the field. A total of 270 papers published between 2015 and 2025 in English were selected from the Scopus database. Quantitative analysis and visualization were performed using Excel and VOSviewer. The results uncover that more than 90% of publications were published after 2023. This shows that tourism using metaverse is a new research topic. Dominant journals were International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Information Technology and Tourism, and Tourism Review, whereas the most cited papers were written by Buhalis, Gursoy, Koohang, and others. The keyword co-occurrence analysis disclosed six dominant thematic clusters. Those are: tourism applications, technologies (VR, AR, XR, etc), user experience and digital environments, acceptability and adoption, sustainability and tourism development. These clusters exhibit the multidisciplinary field of tourism using metaverse. Research shows that tourism experiences and destination promotion practices have been altered substantially by the metaverse. In order to enhance the analysis, the further studies should treat subjects like: the regulation of virtual spaces, ethics, and sustainability.