Tourism is more of a social act than a content-consumption one. People brag when they go to the museum, but never when they binge-watch paintings at 3 AM on the Internet.
I could see it really enriching the lives of those who can't afford to travel.
I do it myself sometimes with Google street view. I'll go "visit" some random place.
But I still think virtual tourism will stay niche in the future because of the social reasons I stated.
Why do you think people consume porn instead of having the real thing?
Society still treats travel and vacations as an extravagant, frivolous activity to be "earned", rather than one of the fundamental joys of life which should be regularly experienced.
Also, visiting fictional places will only be possible through virtual tourism, or fantasy tourism if you will.
Maybe in time.
Aside from letting artists and engineers paint/sculpt/model more intuitively in 3D space, I still believe that the killer app for VR on the consumer side would be virtual tourism.
Coming full circle to the View-Master [0], except this time people could practically live in their favorite fantasy or sci-fi locations.
Imagine being part of the crew on the USS Enterprise, or idling the hours away smoking the halflings' leaf in the Shire..
Right now though, VR is just a fancy display tech, but with lower [apparent] resolution than many existing 2D displays and comparatively poor, often fatigue-inducing interactivity in almost all cases, apart from the aforementioned placement of 3D objects.
Why has nobody dared to drop the pretenses yet, and actually take VR to the level it professes to be: supplanting reality?
Make it more than just a display.
Invent some kind of cabin with climate control and aromatic components, that lets your other senses and your entire body feel like you're someplace else. Feel the tropical wind on your face without leaving the concrete jungle of your megacity.
Of course at first such tech would be too expense to have in most people's homes. So you might also usher in a renaissance of public arcades; VRcades? :)
People could start going there as an alternative to expensive vacations.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View-Master