5 FAQs About Virtual Tours for Hotel Owners
Ready to market your hotel in an innovative way? Want to get creative and do something out of the box? This time it takes more than words.
While words are great when describing your hotel to potential guests and highlighting your hotel, rooms, and amenities, you can do more. You can really unleash the power of visuals to capture your target audience. (tweet this)
One of the ways you can do this is with a virtual tour. Imagine a prospective guest scouring your website for photos. They find your virtual tour, and they can see your property from 360 degrees. Plus, because you offer a virtual tour, you’re likely to beat out your competition.
In this article, let’s look at five FAQs about virtual tours for hotel owners.
#1: What is a Virtual Tour?
A virtual tour is an interactive, online tour. It lets your potential guests explore your hotel online. You’ll find there are several ways to create a virtual tour. You can use 360-degree panoramic images, regular images, and even video.
Virtual tours help your audience get a complete picture of your hotel from the rooms, bathrooms, public spaces, pool, spa, workout area, restaurants, and other amenities you offer. People can view the inside of your hotel from different angles and perspectives.
What’s great is those potential lodgers can “try out” your property as they immerse themselves in your virtual tour. They can go from room to room as if they were actually walking around.
#2: How Do You Create a Virtual Tour?
You can put your virtual tour together in multiple ways:
- Combine still images.
- Use videos.
- Add music and/or narration.
- Use sound effects, text, and other multimedia elements.
The goal is to engage your potential guests.
Generally, you film a virtual tour from a first-person perspective, so the viewer feels like they are walking through your property. You want them to feel like they are actually inside your hotel, getting an immersive experience. Finally, the goal of the virtual tour is ultimately to get them to make a reservation.
While you can create a virtual tour on your own, there are many companies on the internet who will do it for you for a fee.
#3: Why Should I Offer a Virtual Tour?
There are so many reasons to offer a virtual tour on your hotel website. Here are a few:
- It can increase your traffic and your bookings. In fact, hotels with virtual tours on their websites generally have increased website traffic, and people spend much longer on their websites than those without virtual tours.
- A virtual tour helps the overall customer journey. You may know that people are searching Google, Facebook, Trip Advisor, and others to look for reviews about your property. They want to know what others think about your hotel, and they want to know how the stay went. You can bolster these online reviews by showing people what they will actually get at your hotel through a virtual tour. They can see it’s clean, modern, and full of amenities. Thus, you increase your chance of making the booking.
- You improve your overall marketing strategy. You can use your interactive virtual tour on your website as well as your social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. This helps you expand your reach and increase engagement.
#4: How Long Should My Virtual Tour Be?
This is entirely up to you. For example, your tour may last a few minutes, or it could last an hour.
Basically, the length of your virtual tour depends on how much you have to show your guests. At a bare minimum, you want to show them each type of room you offer, all of the public areas, your restaurant, and your amenities.
Make your tour stand out by ensuring it looks professional and your image quality is excellent. Your tour should also be realistic and accurate. For example, don’t show a room that looks immaculate if that isn’t the quality of your housekeeping.
Finally, make sure your tour is intuitive and very easy to navigate.
#5: How Can I Make the Tour Unique?
One way to set your tour apart from other hotel tours is to have a guide. For example, have your general manager introduce the tour and then lead people through different areas.
The key here is also to let your customers do their own looking around as well. Your guide might talk briefly and then send people on their way to look around. The guide can then come back periodically to talk to your tour guests.
Final Thoughts
Did you know that many of your customers are 130% more likely to book your hotel if you have a virtual tour? Some of your potential guests won’t even book a room with you if they can’t see a virtual tour first.
With a virtual tour on your website, your customers have control. They can move through your tour at their own pace, stopping when they like and moving quickly at other times. Your guests can pause a tour, or they can zoom in.
You are putting their reservation right in their hands, and people today like that kind of control. They also like to be well-informed before spending their money.
Adding a virtual tour to your digital marketing strategy opens up endless opportunities for you and your customers. You put the power in their hands by offering them an attractive, user-friendly virtual tour that shows them just what they’re looking for. Ultimately, they use that power to make a reservation at your hotel.
Try a tour today to see just how much it improves your overall reservation goals.
We are your hotel’s digital advertising specialists, and we can help you market your hotel for success by leveraging the power of a digital tour. We can also create a website and a winning social media marketing strategy that also ties back into your website. As experts in website design and redesign, we can also create a new website or refreshed one that is accessible to all. And we can also help with search engine marketing, online booking, online listings, and social media marketing. We are here to help. Contact us today for your consultation!
Image: Jodie Cook and Firmbee.com on Unsplash
Free Hotel Website Checklist
5 Essential tips for using your website to book more guests! Plus, a Free email course, Winning Web Strategies For Innkeepers.