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This paper aims to find out if it is possible to consider live virtual tours, in the connotation assumed during the COVID-19 outbreak, as experiential tourism products. The paper focuses on Holbrook's “four Es” (“experience”, “entertainment”, “exhibitionism” and “evangelising”) to study the experience of live virtual tours.

This article develops an exploratory analysis and presents a content analysis of 1052 reviews of 108 live virtual tours posted on TripAdvisor and Viator.

The findings show that live virtual tours are perceived as experiences, all “four Es” are covered and two more sub-categories emerge.

The analysis is limited to the perception of tourists that are confident with the technology, to a small sample and a period of travel restrictions due to the COVID-19 outbreak.

Live virtual tours create a new segment, which “travels from home”. This does not preclude tourists from deciding to physically visit the places seen virtually.

Research on the analysis of the reviews of live virtual tours has not yet been carried out.

Purpose – This chapter examines individual and collective quests for authenticity, as experienced through consumption activities within an urban neighborhood. It investigates the interplay between consumption experiences as authenticating acts and authoritative performances (Arnould & Price, 2000), and considers the implications with regard to Zukin's (2010) theories on urban authenticity, and how it may be experienced as new beginnings and origins.

Methodology – The chapter is based on autoethnographic research that explores how interaction and identity definition within servicescapes can work to construct place-based community.

Findings – It describes how a servicescape of new beginnings offered opportunities for individual authentication that also enabled personal identification with a specific cultural group. This authentication drew on the cultural capital embedded in such locations, including their association with gentrification. This is contrast with the collective identification offered by a servicescape operating as a place of exposure. This site of origins displayed the social practices of a different demographic, which worked to highlight a relational link between the authentication practices of the broader neighborhood. These sites also worked cumulatively, to highlight the inauthenticities within my identification practices and offer opportunities for redress. Through this interplay it was possible to establish an authentic sense of neighborhood that drew on its new beginnings and its origins, and was both individual and collective.

Originality – Through the combination of urban and consumption-based perspectives of authenticity, and an autoethnographic methodology, this chapter offers a different insight into the ways identification with, and attachment to, a neighborhood can develop through consumption experiences.