Virtual and augmented reality are being used both as “low cost” travelling experiences (e.g. the Munich 360° VR app1)) and to enhance real visits of monuments in the field of tourism. These apps can either be created from scratch, or be built on top of tourist guides or other pre-existing documentation. In this paper, we suggest an alternative, potentially lower-effort way to create virtual reality applications to heighten interest in specific areas and promote tourism: since virtual reality is increasingly being used in the professional and academic fields to study a multitude of systems in various domains, we propose repurposing those which could be of interest for tourists/visitors. And analyzing the cases, we classify them by technology use, co-creation and timing of the experience with respect to the actual visit (pre-, during and post-). The results in this paper should be generally applicable to other suitable virtual reality tools in use by other researchers worldwide, and should enable the increased awareness of less-known tourist destinations.