If you look at things in perspective, a hotel travel chain all the way through to a self catering unit, someone has spent a lot of money and time put together to create an experience of sorts for guests unknown. It therefore makes perfect sense to want to display your rooms and general facilities with maximum exposure. It’s after all your final product, and when guests book in, it would be really great if they first made a choice based on what they have seen online. Presently most travel destinations do not have panoramic tours. I would like to outline the major advantages of having a tour that helps you and your customers in a few important ways.
Visibility
Okay, this is the obvious advantage off the bat. But it goes further than that. All your marketing is pointing towards creating a general impression of your business. What better marketing tool, that allows you absolute control of your brand. Most guests like to see the entire room available and also like to take a peak at what the shower/bath situation is all about. At specific points in the virtual tour we can setup calls to action based on impulse bookings, and customers can take advantage straight from the bedroom, or wherever else can want calls to actions to go.
Time
The knock-on effect from having total visibility is that customers spend more time visiting your home page, viewing rooms and navigating. This in turn increases your customers time on page which google uses as one of their primary content quality signals. The longer they stay and interact, the better your position in the search results will appear. What is the average time on site per visitor? The average for websites is 2-3 minutes. With a virtual tour your average time on site may be quadrupled or more.
Presales Liaising
Often there is a flurry of emails that ensues after a person has expressed interest about a booking date and rooms available. With a virtual tour most of the times clients proclaim that they want a specific room because they liked what they see and wish to stay in there. The advantage of a virtual tour also changes the way your bookings organizers direct customers after enquiring with additions of links and directions to view the options available.
Online Maps
Recently Google have opened a service that allows businesses to connect with their Street View what they call Google Indoors. With our tours we can connect your virtual tour directly to a Google service. Currently we are working toward attaining the acclaimed Google Indoors Partner stamp of approval. Getting listed on Google Street View with Indoors activated will increase your customer base gradually over time.
Competitor Advantage
It makes sense to go the extra mile for your customers and in the process outshine your competitors with something that stands out amongst the rest.
Trust
Last but not least, for definite, is trust. Your new virtual tour eliminates all shadows of doubts that you do indeed have all the rooms available and you have them available for all to see. It does change the way a would be customer behaves with your services offered in that they no longer need to do any due diligence. Having a well thought out virtual tour saves you time and allows your customers full access. With building instant trust, along follows more enquiries with less questions.