Understanding the development of blockchain-empowered metaverse tourism: an institutional perspective

Blockchain and the metaverse are believed to be the most disruptive technologies that would transform the current tourism and hospitality landscape. Although publications on the metaverse and blockchain have emerged in recent years, most are conceptual and speculative, with little discussion on how a destination adopts such innovative technologies and develops blockchain-empowered metaverse tourism. This study adopts a sociological lens to explore what and how various institutional forces affect stakeholders’ technology adoption on blockchain and the metaverse and the impact of such behaviors on a destination’s blockchain-empowered metaverse tourism development by drawing upon the institutional theory. In the case of Macau, this study found that multiple stakeholders’ perceptions and adoption of blockchain and the metaverse are increasingly homogeneous under similar coercive, mimetic, and normative forces in the destination, leading to institutional isomorphism and stakeholder collaboration. These results promote mutual understanding, information exchange, and technology acceptance in the destination, thereby contributing to the destination’s blockchain-empowered metaverse tourism development. The main contribution of this study lies in its novel attempt to reveal how blockchain-empowered metaverse tourism germinates in a tourism destination with empirical evidence. The findings of this study provide practical references for tourism stakeholders who hope to embrace the imperative digital trend and harness the power of state-of-the-art technologies to remain competitive and raise the awareness of academia on the new paradigm of tourism destination development.