3D virtual tour for a hotel: how to increase direct bookings without OTA commission
If you manage a hotel and want to reduce the share of the OTA commission, 3D tour hotel booking is a working tool: it removes the guest’s “blind spot” when choosing a room and transfers traffic from aggregators to your website. In the guide, we’ll go through step by step how to prepare a shoot, integrate a tour into a funnel and link it to a booking form. The material is useful for owners, marketers and managers - especially those who pay Booking, Ostrovok or Yandex.Travel 15-25% from each night. Briefly: a 3D tour increases the share of direct bookings by removing uncertainty before payment. On our projects, the conversion to an application through the website grows by an average of 1.5–2 times in the first three months after the tour is installed. Step 1. Make a list of interiors for shooting. You don’t need to shoot the entire hotel. At the start, there is enough: a lobby, a restaurant and a breakfast area, a SPA or a swimming pool (if available), and one reference room of each category. A hotel in Sochi with 40 rooms cost us six filming points - this was enough to cover 85% of guest requests. Categories cannot be mixed. If you have “Standard”, “Junior Suite” and “Lux”, we rent three different rooms. Otherwise, the guest will see “Standard” on the website, and “Lux” on the tour, and trust will be lost. Step 2. Embed the tour on the main page and in room cards The main mistake is to hide the tour in the “About Us” section. A guest who comes from an advertisement will not reach him. The tour should be on the first home screen and always inside the card of a specific room, next to the “Book” button. In the “Suite with Sea View” card, only a tour of this very suite is appropriate. A boutique hotel in Kazan did this: each room card has its own mini-tour, and the share of direct bookings after two months increased from 12% to 28%. Step 3. Connect the tour with the booking form The tour itself is a viewing. To get a reservation, you need dots inside the tour with a “Book this room” button. The guest clicks on the bed or the view from the window - a form opens with a pre-selected category and dates. This closes the classic scenario: “I looked - became interested - lost motivation while looking for a button.” We make connections through TravelLine, Bnovo, Bitrix24 and direct webhooks - the choice depends on your PMS. Step 4. Connect analytics and UTM tags Without measuring the effect, you will not prove to the owner that the tour works. Minimum: event “opened a tour”, “spent more than 30 seconds in a tour”, “clicked a reservation from a tour”. We create goals in Yandex.Metrica and pass source=tour to the reservation form. A month later, a client in Kaliningrad showed us the unloading: with an average site conversion of 1.8%, visitors who completed the tour booked in 6.4% of cases. Here's the argument for next season's marketing budget. Step 5. Use the tour in email and messengers The tour is not only about the website. It is convenient to insert a link to a specific point (for example, the view from the window of room 305) in WhatsApp correspondence of the reservation department, in letters after a request, in social network posts. The manager does not describe the room in words - he sends a link, the guest views the panorama himself. It sounds like a small thing, but this is what shortens the “question → answer → solution” chain from three days to half an hour. Step 6. Select tour placement format We have three working scenarios. Cloud 360° Space - high-speed servers with technical support, suitable for most hotels. Customer server - when the network has a strict security policy and the tour must live within its own domain. Offline version - for exhibitions and presentations without the Internet: a country complex in the Moscow region asked for such an assembly for a stand at MITT, the tour ran on a laptop without a network for two days. For the VR headset we are putting together a separate assembly - the “come to the sales office and try on the number” format. View all projects → Typical mistakes when launching a tour for a hotel One tour for the entire hotel. Without division into room categories, the guest gets lost and does not understand what exactly he is booking. Tour only on a separate page. If it is not in the number card next to the booking button, the effect on conversion is minimal. Shooting in daylight from the window. Morning and evening light give different moods. You need to shoot with the full lighting scenario turned on - this is how the room looks like in the best photos. No analytics. In six months, no one will remember what happened BEFORE and will not be able to calculate the ROI of the project. Frequently asked questions How much does a 3D tour cost for a hotel with 30–50 rooms? Basic photography of the lobby and 4–5 reference rooms - from 60,000 ₽. If you need all the rooms individually, a spa, a restaurant and integration with PMS - usually 180,000–350,000 rubles. We calculate the exact estimate according to the hotel plan using the calculator on the website. How does a tour affect OTA commissions? Directly - no way, OTAs do not prohibit the availability of the tour. Indirectly - a guest who sees a detailed 3D tour on your website more often returns to book directly, bypassing Booking or Ostrovok. In our cases, the share of direct bookings is growing by 10–20 percentage points. per quarter. Is it possible to embed a tour on a website using Bitrix or Tilda? Yes, the tour is embedded via an iframe in one line. Works on Bitrix, Tilda, WordPress, Modx, and on its own engines. Additionally, we connect booking points inside the tour - they open your PMS form with the specified parameters. Calculate costProject catalogMatterport