When Does Virtual Visitation Become Tourism? A Boundary Model of Remote Tourism Participation

Abstract

Digital platforms enable encounters with museums, heritage sites, wildlife reserves, and destination replicas without corporeal travel, yet tourism scholarship lacks a defensible rule for deciding when such an episode constitutes tourism participation and not media consumption, education, or promotion. This conceptual theory article develops an episode-level boundary model of remote tourism participation through problematisation and integrative theoretical synthesis. Three constitutive tests are derived: destination orientation, mediated spatial encounter, and visitor-position enactment. All three must be evidenced, although their empirical manifestations may vary across technologies and cultural settings. Destination-linked consequences are treated as evaluative outcomes rather than inclusion requirements. The model is stress-tested against guided virtual museum visits, interactive wildlife livestreams, metaverse destination replicas, documentaries, promotional simulations, and booking searches. It distinguishes remote participation from tourism facilitation, destination media consumption, and non-touristic virtual activities whilst differentiating between autonomous, preparatory, and complementary episodes. The study extends stationary-tourism scholarship by treating non-movement as a scope condition rather than a sufficient definition and by shifting classification from technologies to realised participant–destination relations. The model offers researchers a proposed auditable classification procedure, provides managers with design and evaluation criteria, and enables policymakers to recognise remote participation without conflating it with physical arrivals.