360 Virtual Tours for Tourism and Real Estate Industries - Part 4

Usage of Virtual Tours in the Tourism and Real Estate Industries

The previous articles regarding the various usages of virtual tours in the tourism and real estate sectors may not yet have you convinced of their advantages. Here, we introduce some hard figures that may help you realise the strength of such solutions and adopt them in your company.

In this last article of our series on the usage of virtual tours in the tourism and real estate sectors, we provide some interesting usage statistics.
 

Real estate sector
 

There are three main ways to showcase a property and their efficiency has been analysed in a study provided on the vri.mc website:
 

> Providing only the property's characteristics (surface, location, …): 24% of visitors are interested in the property
> Providing the characteristics along with photos and videos: 37% of visitors are interested in the property
> Providing the characteristics along with photos and videos, completed by a 360 virtual tour: Interest for the property climbs to 48%
 

There are currently 30'000 real estate professionals worldwide, in over 90 countries, using virtual tours to showcase their properties. Yet, this only represents 22% of actors involved in the sector!

Using virtual visits should be attracting many more people in this sector, as shown in the following statistics issued by several important real estate websites:
 

> Realestate.com.au: Virtual tours increase online interactions by 600% and per agent calls by 200%
> Apartments.com: Reach 50% more qualified buyers
> Realtor.com: 50% of visitors spend over two minutes exploring virtual tours
> Se Loger: Property adverts using virtual tours have 3-5x more contact requests

Tourism sector
 

As we saw in a previous article, a majority of people spend time preparing their next holiday:

> 85% of people use the web to prepare their travel
> They visit on average 22 websites, during 9.5 different sessions, before booking their travel

(Source: Google ThinkInsights 2011)

Making travel planning more efficient (save time) and more pleasant (help the visitor dream) using a virtual tour therefore provides a true-added value at this stage.
 

Figures published on panomatics.com show how efficient virtual tours are:

> Hotels providing virtual tours are seen 87% more online than those without
> Visitors spend 5-10x more time on the websites of hotels with virtual tours
> Tourism websites using virtual tours generate 50% more interaction than those only using photos
> 75% of clients state that using virtual tours had a critical impact on their travel booking decisions
 

(Source: panomatics.com/statistics)