How Virtual Tours + eCommerce can save the Hotels and Hospitality industry

The world has changed and because of global COVID-19 pandemic, people are restraining themselves to homes, making it very hard for hotels to attract the kind of traffic they are used to, especially during a festive season like Deepawali and winter holidays. But, instead of trying to bring the customers to hotels, hotels are bringing themselves closure to the customers by creating immersive 3D virtual tours with eCommerce to reinvent or improve the overall experience.

A 3D walkthrough enables your guests to experience your property as if they were really there, going far beyond photographs and 360 tours, helping your property stand out from the competition.

Knowing how critical the future is to the hoteliers, here are seven ways virtual tours can help save the entire industry:-

1. Teleport people to your hotel instantly — Creating a virtual tour is a great way to teleport people to your hotel so that they can walkthrough and can see how actually the property looks like. 3D virtual tours are better than the 2D pictures and according to the Vacasa* Case study, virtual tours lead to 14% increase in bookings and 300% greater engagement when you compare with 2D imagery. Here’s a great example of The Belfry Hotel and Resorts in UK coming to life with a 3D virtual tour.
2. Add e-commerce — A 3D digital twin, combined with tags, like this Ferguson showroom in Chicago, is an excellent example of how the overall experience can be elevated. You can tag things from your hotel and take your visitors to the link where they can order food, book office space etc.
3. Enhance storytelling — A virtual tour is not a way to enhance the experience of your visitor, it’s a way of telling a story in your style, you can add text, images and videos to make it richer and more relatable. An awesome example to this is the way we are working with 1AQ and Ojas art gallery, bringing alive the exhibition of paintings.
4. Attract an international audience — Land is not a limitation when you work with 3D models, the entire universe becomes your market. 3D model combined with modern digital marketing and social media can take your hotel to all over the world. Here’s Taj City Centre being converted into a digital twin, to make it accessible and functional, all across the world. Tomorrow the entire world would be a stage for this hotel to perform.
5. Attract event planners with virtual walk-throughs — By enabling event planners to see and explore your event venue in immersive 3D, you will save time on in-person visits and increase venue bookings. You can reduce walkthrough requests by providing 3D tours that provide planners with a sense of actually being in the space. The booking process gets a boost as the planners can further share the space with other stakeholders and can take constructive feedback, without visiting the site. Leads become productive and funnel becomes better.
6. There is more — Once the scanning is done, you can get 4K print quality photographs. You can publish this on any of the social media sites. You can publish to Google Street View — giving people a tour straight from google search. You can embed the space in your website as well. You can get floor plans in 2D and 3D with kinds of seating and details on capacities.
7. It’s easy to get started — The great thing about this is its very easy to get started, you just need to get in touch with us at [email protected] and we would make this happen, fast.

Our collaborations with various tech companies and our proprietary platform is making this and more possible.

At Spalba we are making this dream come true and getting the hotel and hospitality industry ready for the next decade.