Metaverse and tourism development: issues and opportunities in stakeholders’ perception

In recent years, understanding how the managers of tourism attractors (such as archaeological parks, museums, seaside resorts, nature reserves, etc...) adopt, refuse, integrate, and benefit from the digital transformation has received growing interest. In addition, consistent case-study literature highlights how adopting technologically advanced tools can generate positive externalities for the territories in which such attractors are located. However, it is still unclear how different tourism stakeholders value including Metaverse tools in their strategies. In this paper, we explore stakeholders’ preferences for embedding metaverse tools in their strategy, and we check for the existence of cluster of preferences. The study applies a recent development of Q-methodology which allows substituting classical q-statements formulation with multi-attribute and multi-level formulations. Data are collected by involving stakeholders from Sicilian territories. The results of this exploratory study demonstrate that the use of the Metaverse tool is influenced by the perception of the stakeholders and confirm the existence of heterogeneous preferences among groups of stakeholders, as expected in a diffusion model of innovation. The dominant point of view considers a full awareness of the metaverse tools and perceives them as slightly worse than the social ones. Some stakeholders do not have adequate knowledge of the Metaverse. We can argue that we are still in a moment of transition in the diffusion of the Metaverse between the phase of persuasion and that of evaluation and decision on the basis of the impact effects of the Metaverse on competitiveness within the tourism sector. The critical mass may not have been reached yet in the adoption rate of Metaverse innovation.