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Scholars have increasingly researched on how the uprise of Technologies 4.0 will alter the way in which the tourism destinations, the hospitality and tourism sector will operate. Research points out to the fact that the massive digital transformation can lead to a human-centric experience design perspective which is against the principles of tourism sustainable development. In fact, one of today's challenges is predicting how destinations can use immersive digital experiences like metaverse to instill sustainable behaviours. Bearing that in mind, in this chapter, one first explores the concept of metaverse in general and after in the context of tourism destinations management organisations, showing that metaverse that seeks to turn imagination into reality using a panoply of technologies should be seen as the perfect mean for sustainable tourism.

The study proposes a conceptual framework to create an understanding of metaverse experiences envisioning sustainable practices.

Finally, one identifies research gaps and proposes an agenda with the potential of benefiting destination's management organisations. Furthermore, it was our intent to identify opportunities and challenges involving the use of metaverse with sustainable ends by tourism destination management organisations.

This study assumes that metaverse can be used by destination management organisations to educate potential ‘tourists’ by providing to them innovative educational environments where they can ‘live’ all sorts of non-human-centric sustainable experiences. With that intent, a model for the implementation of metaverse was created with its foundations on current experiments happening worldwide.

Building on a TripAdvisor data for five Mediterranean destinations, namely, Greece, Croatia, Italy, France and Spain, this study analyses the constituents of restaurants' online reputation and their interrelation with destination competitiveness, in particular two Travel and Tourism Competitiveness Index (TTCI) pillars, namely, Prioritisation of Travel and Tourism and Price Competitiveness.

The analysis has revealed that restaurants' online reputation is positively influenced by two factors, namely, Core elements, i.e. cooking, service and price-quality ratio, and Price. Furthermore, the restaurants' online reputation does not influence destination competitiveness (TTCI) directly, but indirectly throughout its main constituents, i.e. service and price. Price is the only variable with significant influence on overall TTCI. Within the sample of these destinations, Balkan countries, i.e. Greece and Croatia, perform very well in terms of their restaurants' online reputation. On the other hand, considering the overall TTCI rating, their competitive positions are substantially lower than those of Italy, France and Spain.

The study provides new insights into the relationship between gastronomic offer and destination competitiveness, and valuable practical implications for destination and hospitality management. Moreover, this study addresses various gaps in existing research on this topic. Specifically, it validates the reputation elements presented online using TripAdvisor data and analyses the impact of electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM) not only as the outcome variable of other constructs, as is the case in the literature, but also as a central construct of the analysis. In doing so, it extends current research on this topic and fills the gap regarding the inclusion of the supply-side stakeholder perspective, which has long been recognised as necessary in any attempts to measure competitiveness.

We review the literature on stress in organizational settings and, based on a model of job insecurity and emotional intelligence by Jordan, Ashkanasy and Härtel (2002), present a new model where affective responses associated with stress mediate the impact of workplace stressors on individual and organizational performance outcomes. Consistent with Jordan et al., emotional intelligence is a key moderating variable. In our model, however, the components of emotional intelligence are incorporated into the process of stress appraisal and coping. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the implications of these theoretical developments for understanding emotional and behavioral responses to workplace.