The metaverse, driven by cutting-edge technologies such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), and blockchain, is transforming industries, including sustainable tourism and cultural heritage preservation. By offering immersive and interactive experiences, it addresses challenges in traditional tourism and enhances global access to cultural heritage. However, its adoption faces technical limitations, such as scalability, performance, and ethical concerns. This research introduces the ECHO-M framework, which integrates ethical principles specific to the metaverse, accounts for decision-making uncertainties, and combines the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) with the Technique for Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to prioritize cultural objects for digitization. ECHO-M offers a structured, ethical, and scalable approach to advancing sustainable tourism and cultural heritage in the metaverse. The experiments revealed the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid AHP-Fuzzy approach compared to other methods. Moreover, the results highlight the framework’s capacity to strike a balance between technical precision and ethical responsibility, thus advancing the discourse on digital heritage management in the metaverse.