CDG Interactive Blog

Hotel and resort virtual tours have pretty much been the red-headed stepchild on interactive marketing.  Most hotels and resorts invest so little in the interactive tours that they are pretty much useless.  What you end up with is a canned video presentation with lame voice overs or one of those 360 panoramic things that just tells you nothing.  Video used to be so expensive that that's about all a hotel could afford to do.

But, it looks like things might be changing for the better.

Video is now digital, which lowers costs a great deal and new video search engines like Trivop are making it worthwhile to create videos that are quality.  The Trivop videos forgo the boring voice overs in favor of hip music, and the videos display a sense of quirky humor.   The videos have a real "walk through" feeling and seem less staged than most virtual tours.  They also start on the street and give you a sense of the neighborhood.

Right now, Trivop is only in Europe, but I'd love to see hotels and other businesses begin to take their cues from the style of this site.  If hotels and resorts moved away from the traditional virtual tour companies and started working with small video companies like Chop Shop Studios they'd get virtual tours that actual show the personality of the hotel and provide potential guests with real insight into the hotel..

So stop just going with that free virtual tour vendor and invest a little in the virtual tour experience.  Now, can we talk about those photos on your website?