360º Virtual Tours from Expedia

G'day Douglas,

Regarding the Radisson Hotel info, I was quoting some of that last year on my site. I got an email from the Sr. Director, Channel Marketing Carlson Hotels Worldwide asking me to remove it, which I did immediately. Here's an excerpt from the email:

"That information is very outdated and does not reflect the nature of the virtual tour business today. We are working on a more scientific ROI model, but the information you have is vastly outdated."

Which reminds me, I asked her if I might see the new research when it was done, she said to contact her later in the year (2006) and we may be able to discuss preliminary results. So I'll contact her now & let you know what I find out.

Thanks,

Aaron Spence
http://pano.com.au/blog

Aaron
Nice to here from "down under"

I know the Radisson data is out of date, but statitics on the ROI of Virtual Tours is hard to come by.

That's why I latch on to each little piece I come accross.

And why I've been writing the series of articles for HotelExecutive.com about how hotels can make better use of their Virtual Tour Investment.

I've closed both of the articles with how few Extra Room Nights it would take for a $2000, 10 scene tour to pay for itself. At a $100 average room rate, only 20 room nights in a year. That could be just 10 two night stays or one small group.

The second article is posted in the Members Only forum

I'd love to see anything new you can get from Radisson

Douglas Aurand
Albuquerque, NM

G'day Douglas,

I know what you mean about ROI data being scarce, the Radisson data I quoted was about all I could find last year.

My experience with Hotels is that the bigger the hotel, the less the chance their marketing people have any idea what they are doing. Therefore they keep doing whatever the previous marketing person was doing. And since they'll only be in the job a year or 2 at most, before moving on, why should they really care?

For this reason I basically stopped approaching anything other than small to medium businesses a couple of years ago. I now deal almost exclusively with the owner or someone with the final yes or no on most projects, which is great.

I hope to get some good ROI data back from the Carlson group, as having some scientific hard data might convince me to start approaching larger properties again. Who knows. I'll let you know if/when I hear something.

>> The second article is posted in the Members Only forum

Is that an enticement to join up ;) I know I have to join up soon.

Thanks,

Aaron Spence
http://pano.com.au/blog

Perhaps you've seen these before, but they're worth sharing nonetheless. . . Although it doesn't speak specifically to ROI for hotels, it does speak to the importance of virtual tour images. Good info to weave into a presentation. . .

From the PEW Internet and American Life Project - http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/143/report_display.asp - and a follow-up report - http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/195/report_display.asp

Cheers,

Hoyle Koontz

Aaron
You only need to convince one of two people in a hotel of the benefits of using a virtual tour; the General Manager or the Director of Sales. One of the two with make the decision to spend the money for a virtual tour.

One of the best times to approach a hotel is right after a major renovation. They just spent thousands, maybe millions to update/upgrade the hotel and with the money flowing, they're more open to the idea.

When a hotel changes owners is a good time too. It time for a different approach, so they're open to new ideas.

And when a hotel is not meeting its goals (hard to determine this one) and the managers want to keep thier jobs, they'll try new things.

You're right that smaller hotels and even B&Bs are easier to sell than major properties. They're a lot more flexibale and open to different approaches

Douglas Aurand
Albuquerque, NM

Doug - I'd like to see the survey you mention above. Could you share it with me via email?

Cheers,

Hoyle Koontz
hkoontz at technipix dot com

Hoyle and all

VFM has several reports online about the benefits of virtual images and video at this link, including the one I mentioned above.

http://www.vfmii.com/knowledge.html

Douglas Aurand
Albuquerque, NM

While I don't expect the best bread from brands like the mass produced - Wonder Bread, I do know they sell a LOT of bread.
I hope Expedia is just a start, and that the other travel sites will "up the ante" on image quality
and interactivity. One site I'm keeping an eye on:
http://travel.supertour.com/lasvegas.aspx

Doug, the ad was in the Boston Sunday Globe travel section, but I'm sure it's been placed in
newspapers across the country.

Good point about the bread, but I'm not convinced that having monster tourism/travel sites produce very poor virtual tours for (no doubt) large sums of money is a good thing for our industry. Having already taken 10yrs to start producing tiny poor VR's, I don't think expedia or the other travel biggies, will be in a rush to produce high quality work.

You and I may pick up a job here an there based on the vast superiority of our work compared to expedia. The cost could be that soon everyone (not just most people) considers virtual tours to be tiny, poor quality, gimmicky things on tourism and real estate websites. At present I believe that view is mostly limited to real estate, enabling those of us working in Tourism & Development to differentiate ourselves somewhat.

Supertours is doing some cool stuff, I agree with you there, but since everything they do is proprietary (and no doubt patented) if they take off and are picked up by large numbers of travel sites, the VR industry won't gain a thing from that either as we can't participate except to be paid, most likely, extremely low rates to shoot large numbers of low rez virtual tours.

Food for thought though, all this talk about bread is making me hungry ;)

Thanks,

Aaron Spence
http://pano.com.au/blog

Hi again Aaron
For some reason Expedia uses that aweful "strip viewer" that doesn't corect the "warp." Their provder, VRX Studio, does show sample tours on their site and on hotel websites with the warp corrected, here's a sample

http://www.sirfrancisdrake.com/virtualtour.html

But they are just Cylindrical Virtual Images, not Spheric or Cubic. That's all VRX produces and somehow they get contracts with major hotel companies like Hyatt, Kimpton and Harrah.

The other 2 big VT suppliers to the hotel industry, PhotoWebUSA.com and ICEPortal.com, use Spheric (or almost spheric) and Cubic.

In my post about the "Challenge to Virtual Tours" another point I wanted to bring up was marketing 360° Imaging as an affordable alternative to video production.

I don't think a rant is the solution, its better marketing in the form of education. Do you have a page on your website about the differnces in virtual imaging types, which one you use and why.

I'm talking to Aldo, about having him make a Macromedia Director movie with my latest and best work that I can put on Mini-CDs and mail out to every hotel in New Mexico. I've fianlly stepped up to larger images (640x480) and want people to see them without having to get them to my site. The infomation with the CDs would explain about the benefits of Virtual over Video in most cases

(Michael probably didn't mind us hijacking his blog, he likes starting a good exchange of ideas)

Douglas Aurand
Albuquerque, NM

I'm familiar with VRX, and boy they pick up the big jobs. I noticed PhotoWebUSA doing HD (fullscreen) cubic work last year which is a great improvement.

>> Do you have a page on your website about the differences in virtual imaging types, which one you use and why.

Sure do... http://www.pano.com.au/fullscreen_virtualtours.htm

I've also been promoting the fact that Fullscreen VR's are the cheapest quality broadband content available. Quicker to produce, cheaper & higher quality than online video, as well as much faster to download. All to no avail. so far. I'm also working on a big project to bring the people to me, rather than the other way around, but that cat's still firmly in the bag ;)

Let us know how you get on with the mini-cds, I've been prepping to do the same thing with DVD videos. Ie using my VR's to produce video sequences & making up a short 5min dvd with examples and explanations of everything. Problem is I've been too busy to get it done (or really started yet :)

Thanks,

Aaron Spence
http://pano.com.au/blog

Aaron
I think you're on the right track with the page you have on your website, but got too wrapped up in promoting QuickTime.

I was taling about what spheric & cubic images, regardless of which technology, can do that video can't.

I haven't got it on my website, but the benfit I wan to point out is that 360° Images most closely duplicate the "Experience of Human Sight"

If you're targeting hotels like I am, you may want to show, online, real life problems hotel sales staff and reservations deal with on a daily basis. I have several of them in my post My Second Hotel Virtual Tour Article at http://ivrpa.org/node/1026

Yes that's a bit of nudge to join up. Also the editor of the online magazine would only let me post the article to the private forum, so it wouldn't be competing with his website.

Douglas Aurand
Albuquerque, NM

Apparently Expedia is doing a "Virtual Tour" marketing campaign.

I saw a television commercial during the Tonite Show with Jay Leno last nite for their sister site, Hotels.com, that was mainly about the Virtual Tours on the site.

Douglas Aurand
Albuquerque, NM

Doug and Aaron,

I happened to come across this blog and thought that I would offer up some input into some of your comments. I am the VP - Sales & Business Development for VFM Interactive and since you have obviously been to our website, you will know that we are in the Virtual Tour Business ourselves. Although we do produce virtual tours, our main service is the management and distribution of media (from stills to virtual tours to video) across travel related sites (I mention this as I do not see VFM as a competitor to either of your companies but perhaps a partner).

We have a number of studies (including those not posted on our site) that we have done that I would be happy to share with you and I also have some insight into the different business models in the industry.

If either of you are interested in discussing please feel free to contact me!

Regards...Mark Charlinski
mark.charlinski@vfmii.com