The latest technological advancements and the emergence of artificial intelligence have led to the rise of Virtual Influencers (VIs), a new frontier in the influencer marketing landscape. VIs look like humans, but they are not human beings. They are created with advanced animation graphics and artificial intelligence-fueled digital technology to portray anthropomorphic features such as human gesture and posture, which empower them to connect with Social Media Users (SMUs) across social media platforms. Akin to human influencers, VIs are also gaining popularity among online users by creating and sharing relevant content on their handles, enabling them to attract a significant number of followers. For example, the famous VI: Lil Miquela appears to be one of the first virtual humans, who has garnered close to three million followers on her Instagram handle. Due to her online popularity, Lil Miquela has been seen to endorse and advertise renowned brands from different industries, such as technology brands (i.e., Samsung), retail fashion brands (i.e., Pacsun) and hotel brands (i.e., Ace Hotel). Tourism and hospitality organizations have recently started to collaborate and partner with VIs to engage with their potential tourism consumers. Nonetheless, scholarly research and empirical evidence on VI marketing still remain underexplored, especially in tourism and hospitality literature. Therefore, it is important to understand what factors and theories are critical which can social media users (SMUs)’ behavioral intention to visit a travel destination or restaurant if promoted by VIs. This dissertation sets out the following research objectives: (i) Comparing nine behavioral intention-based theoretical models (paper one, chapter two), (ii) Developing and testing a unified view of behavioral intention (i.e., visit intention) towards VIs (UBIVI) (paper two, chapter three), and (iii) Proposing and analyzing an integrated research framework to understand why SMUs intend to visit VI-endorsed restaurants (paper three, chapter four). To address these objectives, three studies have been conducted. Study 1 (n = 419; quantitative survey data) was conducted to compare nine theoretical models and examine the significant VI-related factors that can influence SMUs’ visit intentions towards VI-promoted destinations. Study 2 (n=18; qualitative interview data) has been carried out to further re-validate and enrich study 1’s results. The results of study 1 and study 2 have been utilized in paper one (chapter two) of this dissertation. Based on the results of Study 1 and its theoretical underpinnings, UBIVI has been proposed and tested in Study 3 (n = 336, quantitative survey data). The results of study 1 and study 3 have been utilized in paper two (chapter three). Paper three (chapter four) has been built on to develop and test an integrated research model based on significant literature void to understand SMUs’ VI-endorsed restaurant visit intention and again utilizes the dataset of study 3 (n=336) to produce meaningful research findings. Overall, this dissertation, consisting of three studies used across three papers, presents a deeper understanding of the role of VI marketing within the tourism and hospitality industries. Also, the findings of this dissertation provide actionable managerial implications to VI’s creators and producers, marketers, and other relevant stakeholders so that they could leverage VI effectively as their destination place promoters.