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The aim of this research is to investigate how virtual reality, with emphasis on pervasive environments, might affect tourism choice of a destination, in order to exploit it as a marketing tool to promote tourism destination in a global perspective. In particular, the paper analyzes the case of Calabrian territory (Southern Italy), due to the high archaeological value, heritage of the ancient Magna Graecia culture (VIII cent. B.D.‐I cent. A.D.). Despite this heritage, Calabria has been not fully exploited its resources in a tourism perspective.

The research methodology is based on a qualitative approach, focused on a questionnaire promoted along with tourists. In particular, the authors asked them to explore the pervasive environments which reproduce some Calabrian scenarios, and answer some specific questions related to the experience. The interviews have been processed with the MaxQDA software for the content analysis.

Two aspects of the results emerge from a theoretical standpoint: the role of pervasive environments for improving tourism contents communication; and the influence of pervasive environments on the tourists' destination choice. Furthermore, the use of pervasive environments is efficient especially for the territories with a high archaeological value.

The increasing competition among territories forces the tourism industry to develop new strategies for enhancing competitive advantages. This paper studies how pervasive environments might have an impact on the promotion of tourism destinations, which have not been yet fully appraised by the current literature.

This paper aims to provide an assessment of tourism promotion in tourist destinations and airports (TPTDs) and to organize and classify the literature on tourism promotion, with the aim of staging the importance of this topic and encouraging future research in the projection of tourism and marketing sectors.

The paper uses the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) database to analyze the bibliometric in TPTDs topic from 2000 to 2021. Additionally, the paper also uses the visualization of similarities (VOS) viewer software to map graphically the bibliographic material. The graphical analysis uses bibliographic coupling, co-citation, citation and co-occurrence of keywords.

This study provides an amended new definition of tourism promotion, which is the efficient management of a destination’s resources and strategic plans by destination marketing organizations (DMOs) to adapt the tourism supply to market trends and will empower tourists to visit such destinations. Furthermore, results also show a new paradigm applied to TPTDs topic and classified in five first-order research streams. Digital and mobile marketing, infrastructure, branding, quality, accessibility and information factors about a specific destination which are mostly demanded by tourists are considered as an important means of promotion for the tourism industry.

The contribution of this study is important to identify new challenges and opportunities for researchers, DMOs, airport and airlines operators and stakeholders, as disentangling existing contradictions and applying new theoretical framework to make better future decisions by researchers and organizations to provide higher quality to new research in the context of the TPTDs.