From Smart Tourism to Metatourism: A Systematized Integrative Review of Simulation-Based Governance in Urban Cultural Tourism

Urban cultural tourism increasingly affects how cities manage visitor flows, cultural assets, and everyday urban life, making governance more complex as tourism growth creates uneven pressures and benefits. Existing Smart Tourism approaches improve connectivity and prediction but offer limited support for comparing the consequences of alternative interventions. This review reconceptualizes Metatourism as a problem-driven, simulation-based governance framework through which policy-relevant urban relationships are represented, alternative interventions are tested, stakeholder adaptation and policy spillovers are examined, and multidimensional outcomes are evaluated under uncertainty. Using a concept-centric, systematized integrative review of the literature across tourism, urban studies, planning, information systems, computer science, and governance research, the study clarifies the relationship between Metatourism, Smart Tourism, metaverse tourism, and tourism digital twins. The synthesis develops a recursive governance architecture linking sensing, representation, simulation, intervention, evaluation, and feedback; identifies four urban governance mechanisms; and derives seven theoretical propositions concerning platform-mediated value distribution, resident legitimacy, representational adequacy, policy spillovers, agent calibration, cultural-value conversion, and participatory credibility. It also identifies four implementation challenges and five directions for future research. Its main contribution is to shift Metatourism from a technology-centered idea toward an accountable decision-support framework that makes policy trade-offs, uncertainty, and distributional effects more visible before interventions are implemented.