Hotel virtual tours represent a powerful tool for hospitality operators to showcase their business’ spaces and amenities.
A virtual tour can in fact enrich user experience and increase the trust that potential clients put in the hotel’s offerings and quality. At the same time, it creates a distinct experience that can differentiate a business from their competition thanks to providing immersive high quality content.
Are you considering creating a virtual tour for your hotel? Let’s take a look at the top 10 reasons why you should do it.
Why virtual tours for Hotels?
Hotel virtual tours represent the quintessential immersive experience in terms of digital content today. Virtual tours are intended to allow users to experience locations (rooms, common spaces, event venues) as if they were actually there. In addition, they also generate added opportunities for hospitality business.
Offering a virtual tour might be a decisive turning point in closing a deal. It’s a convenient way for potential clients to understand a hotel’s facilities, and adds possibilities of interaction (including clickable areas that expand information on particular topics).
Here’s an example! Discover an interactive map with hotspots that hotels such as Meliá International are offering to their clients. At Paradisus Cancún by Meliá, both guests and potential clients can access a 360º aerial view that also contains the specific virtual tours for each space.
Plus, as the platform is interactive, guests can book extra services from it (restaurant, spa, other activities…). In other words, the hotel or resort’s total revenue increases.
The Importance of Hotel Virtual Tours in the Hospitality Industry: 10 benefits
1. Hotel Virtual Tours: High Quality Content
Offering high quality content is crucial to attract and retain customers, build trust, and differentiate a business from main competitors. The virtual tour, today, stands out as an original, high-quality digital experience that generates engagement.
2. Enhanced Visualization and Understanding of Hotel Spaces
Hotel virtual tours typically offer enhanced possibilities such as 360-degree views of spaces and interactive features (including pop-up images or videos). These aim at providing users with an enhanced understanding of a space.
In fact, this factor can be especially important for booking events at hotels that offer MICE services. This kind of content can help planners gain a better insight into how different areas of a space connect and flow together. For instance, Wedding Planners can offer to their clients a higher-quality content to promote hotel spaces.
3. More Accurate and Comprehensive Hotel Room Selection
Hotel virtual tours can help clients make an informed decision that is more likely to lead to satisfying their needs. This is because they provide a realistic view of a room or facility and, in fact, can include comparisons between spaces.
In fact, hotels are using FirstView’s Virtual Sales Platform to generate upselling at the front desk. From this platform, the hotel staff can easily show the room and spaces, creating a unique and immersive experience. Thus, when guests can see with a virtual tour which room they will get by paying extra money, they don’t hesitate. Hotel virtual tours make your rooms even more desirable.
4. Higher conversion rate at Hotel’s Website
Hotel virtual tours can also be a powerful tool for increasing conversion rates. The fact that they’re both engaging and informative means potential clients can feel more confident to make a purchasing decision.
There are several stats that confirm this. One of them was published in 2015 by Google: when the search engine first launched its virtual tour feature, they found out users seeing a listing with a virtual tour are twice as likely to be interested in booking a reservation there.
Additionally, when it comes to hotel virtual tours in particular, research by TIG Global found out virtual tours on hotel websites can increase bookings and conversion rates by as much as 16 to 67%.
Case Study FirstView & Roiback
A study conducted between FirstView and Roiback showed that high quality content such as virtual hotel tours increase web conversion by at least 110%.
The study was conducted on a critical mass of 6,000 users. 50% received FirstView’s immersive content on the booking platform. The remaining 50% were shown traditional photographs. As a result, conversion increased by up to 2.49 percentage points over users who did not see the FirstView content.
Based on the number of digital visits your hotel website receives through the different booking engines, imagine how your conversion and revenue could grow!
5. Upsellings
Virtual tours can be used to showcase upgraded versions of rooms and amenities, providing an idea for customers of what they can expect if they make a more costly investment. They are, as such, a great way to highlight the benefits of including upgrades (such as better views, bigger spaces, and other added benefits).
6. Increased Confidence and Trust in Hotel Selection
Because hotel virtual tours provide a realistic preview of a hotel’s services and spaces, potential clients feel more confident when making their choices. As such, it’s a way to enhance a business’ transparency, all while generating a unique customer experience that doesn’t waste clients’ time.
7. Increased Online Engagement
This type of immersive content is able to capture the attention of online users and generate increased opportunities for engagement. For instance, users are more likely to share this type of content with their followers and friends. They will also likely use the opportunities a virtual tour provides for interaction.
8. Reduced Costs of In-Person Tours and Marketing Materials
From a business perspective, hotel virtual tours are highly efficient tools. Unlike traditional site inspections (in-person tours through the hotel spaces), virtual versions can be viewed multiple times over an extended period of time. This not only helps businesses get more out of their investment but also decreases costs related to staff.
9. Better Promotion of Unique Features and Amenities
There’s no doubt about the enhancement that hotel virtual tours provide compared to static images or text descriptions.This is particularly true when businesses try to showcase unique amenities and services, providing a realistic and comprehensive view of a product.
10. New staff Onboarding and Training
Finally, hotel virtual tours can become an invaluable resource for training new staff members. This application becomes specially important when it comes to onboarding new employees at resorts or big hotels.
New employees can access these tours at any convenient moment and location. Additionally, they generate a consistent training experience that is not dependent on who’s running the training program.
FirstView: provide your Hotel with the highest quality virtual tours
FirstView provides hotels with a new generation of 3D, 360°, and Virtual Reality content displayed through a digital platform. Our technology is designed to help hotel sales teams boost their results. First View presents particular services for booking engines, sales teams, or upselling programs. Find out more at our website.
Get in touch with us to request a demo and find out firsthand how our virtual tours can help you promote your hotel or venue in a whole different way while also saving money.
