Virtual Tours as Immersive Digital Promotion Tools for Tourism Destinations and Higher Education Institutions: A Narrative Review

Abstract

Virtual tours have emerged as useful digital promotional tools for vacation sites and higher education institutions that allow viewers to explore actual venues without geographic or cost limits. Despite the widespread use of virtual tours, research has largely looked at them in isolation, either in tourism or in education, without a comparative assessment across the two sectors. This narrative review synthesizes 70 peer-reviewed research (2009–2024) from Scopus, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar to analyze virtual tour applications, promotional outcomes, and factors determining their success. Results show that 360-degree panoramic technology (50% of tests) is predominant because of its inexpensive cost and wide device compatibility. The main areas of the corpus are tourism (46%) and higher education (44%), which confirms virtual tours as a cross-domain promotional instrument. Virtual tours in tourism boost site awareness and curiosity, and aid pre-visit decision making, with 90% of participants reporting higher visit intention in one study. Virtual tours in higher education help students get to know the institution and help to recruit remote and foreign students. Effectiveness is always determined by four elements, including technological quality, content richness, user technology readiness, and organisational marketing strategy. Five common themes are found for promotional outcomes across both domains: user engagement, immersion and presence, destination and institutional image, visit and enrollment intention, and user satisfaction. Research is heavily centered on Southeast Asia and Europe, with Africa, Latin America, and Central Asia critically underrepresented. The review provides an integrated cross-sector approach with practical consequences for marketing practitioners, tourism companies, and higher education institutions.