Abstract:

Changing socio-economic relations, political structures, technological developments, transportation and communication opportunities, pandemic and crises affect tourism and geography, which has sensitive dynamics. COVID-19, which emerged in December 2019, has turned into a global crisis, and in this process, tourism and cultural places have started to look for ways to combat the pandemic. During the pandemic, travel restrictions were applied on a national and international scale, and countries had to adopt an isolated lifestyle for a while. In the first year of the pandemic, the tourism industry shrank by 72% and regressed to the situation in the 1990s. Museums; digitized its collections and activities and moved them to the virtual place as a strategy to get rid of the pandemic crisis, and trying to keep the interest of the visitors alive. In this context, the research aims to evaluate virtual museums, which started to develop with the effect of postmodernism and became widespread with the effect of the pandemic, through the tourism geography approach. In the study, the situation of virtual museums on a national-international scale was compared in the perspective of supply-demand-spatial distribution by means of secondary data obtained from various sources. With the rapid increase in demand for virtual places with COVID-19, virtual museums, which have become widespread especially in European and North American countries, have attracted millions of visitors. The post-pandemic situation of the demand for virtual museums and their effects on the production-consumption of the place continue to be discussed

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