The Nevada desert unfolds like a Mobius strip beyond my windscreen: the more I drive, the more I seem to be getting nowhere. The landscape is Armageddon flat. Sunlight glares, the radio has fallen silent and the only landmarks are occasional signposts peppered with bullet holes. Then, as my petrol gauge and eyelids fall, the Eiffel Tower looms above the tumbleweed, an hallucination made real.

The Eiffel Tower at Paris Las Vegas Hotel is half the size of the original and made of welded steel, though fake rivets have been added for effect. It rises above a scaled-down Arc de Triomphe, Palais Garnier opera house and buffet restaurant kitted out like a French village. That evening, I sit on the terrace of Mon Ami Gabi bistro, tucking into garlic escargots and filet mignon, served not by an uppity Parisian but a tooth-flashing, all-American waiter. Later, a wander along the main street of this neon-winking fantasy city brings me from Paris to New York and the dark pyramid of Luxor, with its sphinx and temple friezes.

Schmaltzy and surreal – though curiously spellbinding – Las Vegas represents the ultimate in increasingly common tourism fakery. A residential district in Hangzhou in eastern China features another Eiffel Tower and houses modelled on Paris counterparts, right down to their mansard rooflines. Thames Town on the outskirts of Shanghai boasts a village green, pubs, Tudor-style houses and a church. An entire Austrian village has been recreated near Huizhou in southern China, and a new ski resort mimicking Queenstown in New Zealand is in the pipeline.

The Austrians moaned for a while that their World Heritage village of Hallstatt was being reproduced, then accepted the inevitable and decided it was a great marketing opportunity. Anyway, the Austrians themselves do very nicely from fakery, pulling in millions of tourists thanks to The Sound of Music, a story that bears scant resemblance to the actual von Trapp saga. Maria was the disciplinarian; Captain von Trapp the music lover; the family didn't flee over the mountains to Switzerland but calmly took a train to Italy. But do we really care for the truth? If, like me, you happen to prance across a meadow outside Salzburg where the Do-Re-Mi scene was filmed, probably not. The fake version is so much more fun than the reality.

Movies seldom pretend to be anything other than fantasy, and novels are equally invented, but this doesn't prevent them from providing escapism, entertainment, insight and instruction. Yet in the tourist world, authenticity is the catchcry, and fakery condemned. This is absurd on many counts. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with fakery, and it's far more common than you might think. Tourist destinations are anyway never entirely authentic; tourism is an industry dedicated to unreality; and reducto ad absurdum, nobody actually wants to be thrown to the lions in the Colosseum, or to endure the stink of the 'real' Versailles, where courtiers never washed, and urinated in corners.

Are fakes somehow wrong? Not necessarily. You can build a mock Mayflower (the original no longer exists) and use it to say something about seventeenth-century sea travel. You can make a minutely accurate replica of Tutankhamun's tomb, so that visitors no longer destroy the hieroglyphic-covered plasterwork of the original by the simple act of breathing. Or you can replicate the Lascaux Cave in France, with its prehistoric paintings, and take it on world tour, where it can be admired by those without the means to visit the original.

Let us push the boundaries a little further. Is it OK to scuttle the naval destroyer HMAS Swan off Dunsborough in Western Australia to create an artificial dive site? Then surely there's no harm in carting in tons of sand and potted palm trees to create a temporary summer beach in downtown Paris, or making artificial snow for Dubai's indoor ski field, never mind making it for actual Swiss ski resorts. Talking of Dubai, it receives over 13 million visitors annually, twice that of India, a country superbly endowed with a rich culture, history, monuments and varied landscapes. Fakery can't be entirely wrong if so many people flock to it.

Too often, we're quick to deride and dismiss ersatz sights. Perhaps there is something laughable at finding a Leaning Tower of Pisa in Illinois, a Statue of Liberty in Tokyo, or an Uluru and Sydney Opera House in Shenzhen's Window of the World theme park, which brings together 130 world-famous sights. But it might be just a matter of perspective and time. Nobody laughs at Washington DC's Capitol, copied from the Louvre and Pantheon in Paris, or the Palace of Westminster, a Gothic-revival fantasy straight from a lurid horror story. One of the poster-children of tourism, Neuschwanstein Castle in Germany, is a pastiche of Romanesque, Byzantine and Wagnerian styles. It was used as the model for Cinderella's castle when Disney opened its first theme park in the 1950s, piling fake on fake.

Reproductions have actually been around a long time and certainly aren't confined to nouveaux-riches countries. The Chinese could giggle at the chinoiserie craze of the eighteenth century, and the Emirati laugh at the Moorish style of the mid-nineteenth. In Australia since early settlement, homesick immigrants have reproduced the gardens, landscapes and architectural styles of England. Various Chinatowns are nothing more than pseudo-ethnic districts, and the western world too is full of corny theme parks; Europa-Park in Germany supplies a Swiss street, Scandinavian fishing village and recreated Acropolis as background to its rollercoasters.

A bigger question to consider, before poking fun at fake tourism, is whether any tourist destination is actually authentic. I think not. Authenticity (even if that could be defined) simply can't survive in the tourist context. As more visitors arrive, more locals are sucked into an economy that provides rooms, food, bicycle rentals and souvenir snow-domes. Visitors further demand the familiar comforts of home, so what was once a distinctive destination becomes a little bit more like everywhere else. The charm of the tourism product is that it should be untouched and authentic. The conundrum is that, by discovering, visiting and telling others about it, it never remains so.

And yet the 'authentic' experience has become a mantra of tourism, starting from the time we're backpackers with the conceit that Lonely Planet itineraries, banana pancakes and beach parties provide an authenticity not experienced by mere tourists. Such myths are perpetuated by the tourism industry keen to lure travellers with promises of the unique and Edenic. Here we are in our modern, mass-production, same-same lives, but elsewhere more enlightened folk have managed to retain an authentic existence that we can capture for a while, if only we book a holiday in Bali or among the Bushmen of Namibia.

This is nonsense, of course, even if seductive nonsense. The life of a Hong Kong millionaire is no less real than that of a Mongolian shaman, and Provence no more offers the key to happiness than Parramatta or Prahran. But such ideas have a long history: during the Grand Tour of the eighteenth century, bored young European aristocrats thought to find their salvation through the ancient cultures of southern Europe.

Tourism has always been an industry dedicated to unreality, whether for medieval pilgrims, modern backpackers or ocean cruisers. Fakery is what we want, or at least a particularly skewed version of reality. Give me giraffes and rift valleys, not shantytowns and Mugabes. Provide me with a Queensland of coconut palms and sunshine on surf, not cyclones and coal ports. As for the real Hallstatt, is it an authentic Austrian alpine village, with its Korean shop signs, dirndl-donning tourists and dozens of hotels? Not really. Besides, the happy way we regard the Alps is a social construct of nineteenth-century Romantic writers, who transformed the image of mountains from one of danger, difficulty and goitre into a PR delight of snowy vistas, dancing daffodils and hearty Heidi-esque peasants.

A great deal of other European tourism is a seductive hoax predicated on the romance of history that has little basis in reality. Folk in the Middle Ages didn't decorate their old towns with geraniums or eat cream cakes in frilly cafés. Castles weren't retreats for chivalrous knights but intimidating fortresses built by people we'd describe today as dictators and despots. Europeans were never peace-loving people of the Enlightenment, but rather engaged in interminable brutish wars and conquests. And it would be wildly naïve to believe everything you're told by their excellent tourist guides: they relate not truths but stories tainted by nationalism, opinion and the professional desire to embellish and entertain.

Nietzsche once remarked that there are no facts, only interpretations. I'd say: be cautious in judging what's true in travel, and enjoy both the faux and factual in equal measure. Personally, I'm happy with my hokey Hallstatt, one of the loveliest villages imaginable. I like the crazy kitsch of The Venetian hotel in Las Vegas, with its squeezed-up Campanile, Rialto Bridge and Doge's palace. The kid in me thinks: why not? It makes me smile, and there's nothing wrong with that.

If selling a holiday is all about selling a dream, then perhaps fake sights do it best. Anyway, all tourist sights a little bit fake. I don't mind. Give me the old razzle-dazzle, the bread and circus, the smoke and mirrors, the singing gondolier and the homing pigeons, trained to flutter across replica St Mark's Square on the hour. Tourism is a maddening, improbable menagerie of myths, and I love it all.