Key Takeaways:
- The Metaverse has the potential to transform the way people travel, entertain themselves, and interact with others.
- The hospitality industry can leverage the Metaverse to create immersive virtual experiences for customers, such as virtual hotel tours and digital concierges.
- It allows people to experience new places, cultures, and events from their homes, creating a more accessible and convenient form of entertainment.
- The Metaverse can offer new opportunities for personalized marketing, as companies can track and analyze user behaviour in a more detailed and granular way.
- The Metaverse offers a unique opportunity for advertisers to break away from traditional advertising methods and create engaging, interactive, and memorable brand experiences.
The concept of a metaverse, a virtual world where users can interact with each other and digital objects in a shared environment, has been a topic of discussion and speculation for years. However, technological advances are increasing the prevalence of virtual and augmented reality, making the metaverse becoming a reality.
One of the industries that the development of the metaverse could significantly benefit from is the tourism, entertainment, and hospitality industry. In this article, we'll explore how the metaverse could shape the future of these industries and the potential implications for businesses and consumers.
Metaverse Concept for the Tourism, Entertainment, and Hospitality Industries
Metaverse Concept, photo by Pexels
Metaverse is a spatial computing platform that provides digital experiences as an alternative to the real world. It contains all aspects of civilization, like social interaction, currency, trade, economy, and even property ownership.
An entrepreneur and author, Jon Radoff, suggested that the metaverse should comprise seven distinct layers, each affecting a vital aspect of the user experience in various industries.
- Experience: The Metaverse will enable new and diverse experiences by eliminating physical limitations and transferring physical spaces into the digital realm., providing access to currently unavailable experiences.
- Discovery: The discovery layer within the metaverse allows customers to easily find new technologies and communities by utilizing various app stores, search engines, and website ratings. This layer is essential for navigating and exploring the metaverse.
- Creator economy: Developers use various design tools and apps to create digital assets and experiences within the metaverse. As technology advances, platforms create more intuitive and user-friendly methods, such as drag-and-drop and copy-paste tools, to make the process easier.
- Spatial computing: Spatial computing in the metaverse combines mixed reality (MR), virtual reality (VR), and augmented reality (AR), creating an immersive 3D environment for users to interact with and enhance their experiences. This technology has grown in importance as the metaverse continues to develop.
- Decentralization: The metaverse will not be ruled by a central authority. There will be no centralized authority in the metaverse. Instead, as the metaverse expands, scalable ecosystems will enable business owners to offer diverse specialized digital items, all made possible by blockchain technology.
- Human interface: The human interface layer is an essential component of the metaverse, enabling the connection between users and the virtual world. The metaverse's hardware layer must include the capability of human interfacing, allowing users to navigate the virtual world through their 3D realistic avatars and providing an immersive and authentic experience.
- Digital infrastructure: The digital infrastructure layer is a vital component of the metaverse, as it powers and connects users' devices to the network, enabling content distribution. This layer provides a seamless and efficient experience within the metaverse. As technology advances, faster internet networks such as 5G will significantly enhance the overall experience of the metaverse by reducing latency and increasing the speed of data transfer, allowing for a more immersive and responsive virtual environment.
How Could the Industries Benefit from Metaverse?
Industries Benefit from Metaverse, photo by Pexels
While the Tourism, Entertainment, and Hospitality industries can significantly benefit from the Metaverse, business owners and decision-makers must also be aware of the tangible benefits. You can learn more about how the metaverse could help and benefit the industries below:
Inspire Tourism-Related Purchases
A significant plus point associated with the concept of a metaverse in the tourism, hospitality, and entertainment industries is the way it can help to inspire tourists. For example, interactive virtual reality experiences can recreate real-world experiences and environments and give travellers a clear idea of what they might expect when they visit a particular destination.
Hotels and other modes of transportation can apply the same concept, with VR experiences helping potential travellers understand what properties have to offer, how long a journey will take, or various available products and services. Ultimately, this means that the metaverse can inspire tourists and encourage them to complete a booking or purchase.
Enhance the Booking Experience
Aside from inspiring, metaverse within the industries can significantly enhance booking experiences by providing customers with valuable information that cannot be accurately delivered in other ways. Metaverse makes it more likely that customers will complete their booking journey rather than back out and cancel their booking.
For example, hotels, hostels, and apartments can use VT tours or digital avatars to allow customers to walk around a realistic recreation of their property, getting a sense of how big rooms are and what kind of facilities they will be getting.
On the other hand, travel agents can use VR tours to give customers life-like experiences of a location they wish to visit. Tourists can try play-to-earn games with loyalty programs, allowing tourists to earn rewards by completing different activities in the VR world or metaverse.
Increase Booking Volume
Ultimately, metaverse tourism offerings' value increases overall booking volumes. They can gain inspiration from virtual and augmented reality travel technology. Additionally, the experience of booking hotels and restaurant tables becomes more enjoyable, informative, and valuable as a tool for influencing purchase decisions.
Take Entertainment to New Levels
While it has become commonplace for people to use the internet to watch movies, television shows, and play video games, these activities need to be improved to provide an immersive and interactive experience. With the metaverse, people can enter virtual worlds to explore, interact, and even compete with others, enjoying new experiences and previously unheard-of forms of entertainment.
Examples of Tourism, Entertainment, and Hospitality Industries Taking Advantage of the Metaverse
Examples of Tourism in Metaverse, photo by Pexels
The metaverse has opened up new possibilities for the tourism, entertainment, and hospitality industries, providing innovative ways to engage with customers and enhance their experiences.
Immersive Virtual Tour - VR Tourism
Virtual reality technology has the potential to revolutionize the travel industry, allowing for the creation of highly realistic and immersive virtual experiences that can supplement or substitute real-life travel. Virtual tours enable people to explore tourist destinations from the comfort of their homes, while virtual events offer exciting new opportunities for engagement.
Augmented Reality in Tourism
Smartphones and augmented reality apps can help provide information about real-world surroundings. To sum it up, augmented reality could result in interactive hotel elements, tourist destinations powered by Virtual Reality, and the use of beacons.
Facilitating Online Shows and Exhibitions
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, trade shows, exhibitions, and other similar events were negatively impacted, leading to the shift of these events to the virtual realm. However, just like the tourism industry, these events face challenges, like the growing awareness of climate change. Metaverse tourism solutions can take these online events to the next level, providing greater immersion. Not only can we move the live events into digital events, but the kind of social interaction possible in person can also be replicated through the metaverse.
Virtual Theme Parks and Other Attractions
Virtual theme parks, museums, zoos, and other attractions are gaining popularity in the metaverse tourism industry. These experiences offer a sense of realism similar to real-life experiences while providing unique business benefits. For example, virtual theme parks are not subject to the same safety regulations as physical theme parks and can also be free from the laws of physics. Similarly, Virtual zoos do not require the maintenance of live animals and can include many current, extinct, and even fictional creatures.
Marketing Opportunities in the Metaverse
Marketing Opportunities in Metaverse, photo by Pexels
There are several marketing opportunities businesses can benefit from the metaverse; here are some examples.
An innovative method of user interaction
Businesses can leverage the metaverse for advantage as a company provides customers with new immersive experiences and entertainment options. Being among the first companies to offer customers a metaverse experience will give your company competitive advantages and attention.
A company can market its business and invite investors using virtual events
It’s not uncommon to plan a conference or live event that can be viewed online and in person. Many people cannot travel to attend a professional event or conference, but that is still no excuse for not attending. In contrast to a straightforward Zoom conference or Google Meet stream, a virtual event in the metaverse can be a fully-fledged VR experience, with appropriate networking and participation opportunities, rather than just another video in a small window with comments underneath it. Thanks to the metaverse, the spectators will feel more present and immersed in the experience.
Metaverse introduces a new media of advertising
The emergence of the metaverse presents a unique opportunity for businesses to engage with a global audience through metaverse platforms in e-commerce. Brands can leverage this new medium to increase brand awareness and drive sales by using novel techniques for brand storytelling and advertising. As storytelling is one of the most effective ways to connect with consumers, businesses should anticipate the need to adapt their advertising strategies to take advantage of the unique opportunities offered by the metaverse. To summarize, the metaverse opens up a vast new frontier for businesses to expand their reach, engage with their target audience, and create new revenue streams.
Digital wallets and cryptocurrencies make transactions easier
Cryptocurrencies and metaverse go hand-in-hand and will complement each other. Even at this early adoption stage, enjoying the metaverse's benefits will be challenging without digital wallets. Moreover, businesses can control transactions across their virtual ecosystem by adopting cryptocurrencies in the metaverse.
Although the concept of blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies may overwhelm some business owners, the benefits of using cryptocurrency far outweigh the drawbacks. Using cryptocurrency, users and businesses can conduct transactions easily in the metaverse, only requiring a few clicks.
Cryptocurrencies and the metaverse are closely linked and will complement each other. Even in its early stages, it will be difficult to fully take advantage of the benefits of the metaverse without using digital wallets.
While using blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies may seem daunting to some business owners, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. The use of cryptocurrency simplifies transactions, allowing users and businesses to conduct transactions easily and without linking bank accounts to virtual worlds; all payments within the metaverse can be made with just a few clicks.
For example, StarWALLET is a digital wallet that offers an efficient and secure way to manage digital currency transactions. With its user-friendly interface, whether you want to buy, sell, or trade cryptocurrencies, StarWALLET makes it simple and straightforward. Plus, with the added benefit of earning rewards through the StarPOINTS rewards program, using StarWALLET can be a great way to manage your digital assets while reaping the benefits of a loyalty program.
In conclusion, the metaverse has the potential to greatly impact the tourism, hospitality, and entertainment industries by providing new and immersive experiences for consumers. As the metaverse continues to evolve, it will be exciting to see how it will change how we interact with the world.