How Virtual Tours Are Redefining Hotel Guest Experiences

The digital age is upon us and has transformed every aspect of daily life. You’ll especially relate to this if you’re a hospitality business or hotel owner. Guests are expecting more digital-friendly interactions with properties and not just a simple room booking procedure. They want easy and personalized tech-driven experiences from the moment they land on the hotel website or booking platform. This has been setting newer benchmarks across the industry, with smart hospitality being the norm these days.

At the service end of things, contactless and digital check-ins and check-outs are fast becoming popular along with AI-powered personalization engines and guest profiles. You’ll also know about transitioning to QR-based menus and room orders along with smart room controls, integrated CRMs for engagement, and whatnot! Yet, at the booking and discovery end, there’s also huge demand for hotel virtual tours. Customers these days are more inclined towards extensively discovering a hotel thoroughly before they finalize their booking decisions. That’s where these tours can help you offer more immersive experiences to your guests, while improving their overall satisfaction quotient immensely. Sounds interesting? Let us look at this trend closely below.

What Are Virtual Hotel Tours

So, let’s get down to the brass tacks- what is a virtual tour of a hotel? Here are some of the salient features that you should know more about.

360° digital walkthroughs of hotel spaces will help you give your guests more immersive experiences. They can easily explore the entire hotel premises virtually, checking out the exterior, entry, lobby, corridors, common areas, and even their rooms.
A hotel room virtual tour will also help guests understand how the room looks like, the space they can expect, and of course, the amenities that are present inside.
Along with amenities and other infrastructure, there are event areas and other infrastructure that guests can seamlessly check out as well.
You can choose from multiple formats to delight your guests, right from 3D walkthroughs, as mentioned, to VR-compatible tours and even more interactive tours with narrations and personalized engagement.
What happens is that your guests can get a more realistic preview of what to expect while staying at the hotel. This helps them make faster and better booking decisions. One advantage is viewing the space from every angle, thereby building that sense of presence.
You can allow users to zoom in on several finer details, access more information about key features, and move seamlessly between different areas of the premises.
These tours are readily available across multiple devices like tablets, smartphones, and desktops or laptops.

What’s In It For You?

Technology is advancing rapidly and it is important for you as a business owner to stay updated with the latest innovations. VR (virtual reality) is one of the most progressive technology segments and will help you attract more customers and bookings in turn. VR first made major strides in the world of gaming and now hotels are creating virtual tours to give guests 360-degree walkthroughs of facilities, rooms, and other locations. It is more immersive in place of 2D imagery and still photographs. Guests can move within rooms and you can be more transparent about what your property has to offer.

Some examples will drive the point home in this case. For example, there is the Holiday Inn Express in Sydney that has virtual tours on offer for guests. With the in-built 360-degree feature on YouTube, it demonstrates a guest’s journey to the hotel room from the lobby. Various descriptions are also a part of the video, including Free Wi-Fi, Power Shower, Twin Room, etc. The Budapest Marriot hotel also offers such tours with a tagline of Iconic Beyond the View and a glimpse of amenities like local scenery, conferencing for business, in-hotel facilities, and more.

Benefits of Virtual Tours for Hotels

There are several advantages of hotel virtual tours as you’ll discover. Some of them include:

Improved Sales Figures- A well-designed virtual tour will help you scale up your booking rates considerably. You can offer a more immersive and realistic experience to your guests with full transparency. It may make potential customers more inclined towards booking your hotel when they make their final decisions.
Enhance Competitive Advantage- In a competitive yet saturated market, virtual tours may help your hotel stand apart from the competition. While they will offer text descriptions and static images, you can offer this unique feature which will work as a wow factor for your guests. They can be a deciding element, tilting the scales in your favor and giving you a much-needed competitive advantage.
Showcase Your Amenities- Hotel virtual tours help you showcase your clinching points to customers, i.e. your amenities and features. Show them off in all their glory, right from your cutting-edge fitness center and premium spa to your rooftop bar, stunning views, swimming pool, concierge, and whatnot. This will help you target more guests who are interested in these specific features across segments.
Save Costs and Time- Yes, setting up the virtual tour will require an initial investment on your part and also some time. However, it will save you both money and time in the long run. It will reduce the need for any site visit and benefit event planners and corporate clients in making decisions swiftly. You can also reduce the cost of customer acquisition over the long haul, while saving time on creating the right marketing collateral for various segments time and again.
Marketing Benefits- It’s a robust marketing tool that you can leverage for a long time indeed. You can integrate this into all your promotions, social media campaigns, email marketing initiatives, and other branding exercises. It will set your brand apart, while widening your reach and is easily shareable for organic word-of-mouth and dissemination. Combine these immersive experiences with interactive and engaging content, helping guests get a feel of your property like no other!

How Virtual Tours Enhance Guest Journey

A hotel virtual tour goes a long way towards enhancing guest journeys at your property. Here’s how:

Discovery Stage- It’s an increasingly competitive world out there for hotels as you’ll already know. Hence, it’s very important to stand out at the discovery stage, when the potential guest is looking at multiple options in any particular location. This is where a VR tour will instantly draw attention at this stage, thereby setting the stage for a likely conversion ahead.
Research Stage- This is that part of the process when the customer is looking to compare multiple properties before making a final decision. You can offer more immersive exploration and fully transparent details on rooms, lobbies, amenities, space, etc. This will help tilt the scales in your favor.
Booking Stage- When the customer is ready to book a property, it’s your virtual tour that will help you increase conversions significantly. More people are likely to opt for hotels where they can move around and see everything for themselves in advance. And when your bookings go up, so do your long-term revenues!
Pre-Arrival Stage- Guests often face a lot of uncertainty, regarding the availability of certain things at the hotel, common facilities, space on offer, etc. At this juncture, their pre-arrival engagement becomes more comfortable with the tour. They can easily check out things for themselves whenever they want, thereby eliminating any anxiety or doubts before arrival.
Post-Stay- Once guests have stayed at your property and found things just as what they experienced in their immersive tours, it’s the post-stay clincher that will come into play. They will be more likely to share the tour on social media and with people they know, while being more eager to review the hotel itself. It will undoubtedly increase brand loyalty and word-of-mouth promotions.

Pro Tips You Can Use

So, now that you’re aware of the benefits of hotel virtual tours, how do you make them count? Here are some pro tips worth noting in this regard.

Content & Engagement-

Have a content plan in place. Always look to tell a story that highlights guest experiences in a journey-like format. Focus on the unique aspects that you want them to know more about.
Always highlight the USPs and differentiators. Customers should be able to understand why your hotel is different (amenities, location, services, etc.) from your rivals.
Integrate interactive elements as much as possible. Some options include 3D models, videos, clickable hotspots, and additional descriptions.
If possible, you can opt for virtual staging to boost the visual effect in empty spaces. Plan a proper route for the tour, ensuring smooth transitions between multiple zones.
Pay attention to the lighting and how the elements are arranged in every shot. Don’t overdo things with excessive information. Keep it simple and crisp.
Optimize your virtual tour for multiple devices like desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets.

Technical Aspects-

Some technical tools you can consider include a monopod for natural perspectives, central camera placement in rooms, and avoiding overshooting.
Be mindful of reflections in windows, mirrors, screens, etc.
Open the curtains, turn on the lights, and create that much-needed visual interest while considering the sun position as well.
When you’re using multiple shots, ensure suitable stitching to keep errors at bay.

Promotional Aspects-

Integrate the tour with your website. It should be easily discoverable on the homepage and ideally have a dedicated page of its own.
Share snippets of your hotel tour on multiple social media platforms.
Add a link to the tour in your email marketing campaigns.
Include a booking button within the tour, if possible, for quicker and easier conversions.
Use a warm and friendly audio with suitable background music to boost the experience.
Use consistent branding elements like colors and logos in your tour.

Signing Off

As you can see, hotel virtual tours are excellent choices for enabling quicker and higher conversions, attracting more guests to your property, and of course, standing out from your rivals. If you do them right, they will play a massive role in building your brand and transparently showing guests what they can expect.

When you achieve this, there will no longer be any ambiguity regarding booking decisions. And once that happens, long-term customer loyalty, word-of-mouth marketing, and revenue growth will automatically materialize.