The behavior framework of virtual tourists

Technological revolution is an outcome of the third wave of revolutions that has brought forth tangible changes and transformations in all industries, including tourism. Technology advancement creates new opportunities for virtual tourism. As such, the virtual tour experience and the study of tourist behavior have turned into an important subject of tourism studies. In this milieu, the current study aims to identify and explain theoretical frameworks of behavioral domain of virtual tourists. It systematically reviews researches on virtual tourist behavior by taking into account scientific articles published in Scopus-indexed journals between 1999 and 2022 as behavior indicators. The findings demonstrated that China and the United States have been on forefront in researches on the behavior of virtual tourists. The most important theoretical approaches to that behavior are: technology acceptance model, planned behavior, and stimulus-organism-response, theory of flow, attention recovery, immersion and presence. In order to identify main components in the proposed study related to the behavior of virtual tourists, the quantitative content analysis was used. In the end, a conceptual framework was extracted from the content of the articles. It was found that the most important and effective theory in this field is technology acceptance.