abstract nowadays, industries cannot play a crucial role in national and international competitions. the tourism industry is no exception. tourism industry development as the most important economic sector and income generation is one of the key challenges of economic development in the world. therefore, countries were successful that take advantage of the capabilities of tourism sector using information and communication technology (ict) in this industry and finding new ways. the role of ict in the tourism industry can be investigated from two dimensions: "electronic tourism" and "virtual tourism" (non-physical presence in a virtual three-dimensional space). nowadays, demand for new ways of tourism have been emerged which allow people to experience indirect (virtual) tourism through virtual reality (vr) technology due to technological advances and also place, time, financial, environmental and mass tourism limitations. so, many researchers of tourism industry area introduce this type of tourism as a pioneer to the success of tourism industry and to improve economic situation of some countries. thus, different parts of the country should take action towards the implementation of virtual tourism in iran with understanding the effective factors on virtual tourism and developing ict infrastructure. for this purpose, in this study the effective factors on virtual tourism has been investigated using virtual tourism reference model. then, it is tried to examine the impact of electronic readiness and virtual tourism collaborative networks on virtual tourism. the methodology of the research is descriptive-correlation. the statistical population is all managers of tourism enterprises and experts of it sector who offer electronic services. hence, the hypotheses are analyzed by structural equation modeling / path analysis. also spss has been used in order to examine the indicators descriptive statistics and exploratory factor analysis. the results show that the electronic readiness and virtual tourism collaborative networks effect on virtual tourism. keywords: tourism industry, information and communication technology (ict), virtual tourism (vt), virtual reality (vr), electronic readiness, virtual tourism collaborative networks.