Take Your Attendees on a Tour: Virtual Events Collaborate with Virtual Tourism

Virtual tourism or virtual travel is a hybrid concept that is becoming popular. In this article, we will explore the what, why, and where of virtual tourism and how vr tourism planners cater to the growing need for virtual tourism in the business and the corporate world.

What Is a Virtual Tour?

Virtual tour is a panoramic or video stimulation of an already existing place that can be viewed online. To state simply, virtual tourism signifies exploring a realistic place virtually.

Predominantly considered a powerful marketing tool, virtual tourism has now become a much-discussed topic. The increase in virtual travel can be credited to environmental concerns and continued focus on health and safety. Businesses and corporate heads rely heavily on virtual destinations to engage their audience and provide them with an out-of-the-box virtual travel experiences.

Virtual tourism has successfully expanded into various forms. It includes being immersive tourism which means getting immersed in a virtual environment through a headset or a simulator in a more sophisticated setting. Currently, virtual tourism covers a broad spectrum of digitally mediated reality which includes virtual reality tourism also known as VR tourism.

The Growth of Virtual Tourism

Similar to developing virtual solutions in all business forms, the travel and tourism industry also benefits from technological development. Virtual tourism is not limited to keeping the audience engaged when not on the road or providing VR vacations. Instead, virtual tourism can even be an excellent tool for the convention center marketing team to keep a global workforce connected.

Virtual tourism has grown by leaps and bounds. People are now buying houses without actually visiting their desired homes in the first place. Museums are open to a virtual audience via virtual tour guides, and teachers use virtual reality to enhance the experience of advanced education for the students. Even as business travel regains its agenda, connecting employees virtually is more cost-effective for people and corporate heads.

Virtual Tourism Promoting Brand Awareness and Engagement

As we said above, virtual tourism has crossed the limitations of being only a marketing tool for the travel and tourism industry. Instead, virtual tourism businesses can cater to more audiences of their brands and integrate with the in-person and digital worlds. In addition, marketers can now use virtual events to build more engagement with their events and maintain customer loyalty.

For brand awareness, it is essential to acknowledge that the audience generally appreciates the personal touch. Marketers can contact customers based on their preferences with the data gathered through virtual events. Event marketers are not new to launching campaigns relevant to the audience and enhancing the personal touch after collecting data from a specific event.

Familiarizing with the available data can enhance the customer experience, bring diverse clientele, and keep the attendees engaged post-event.

The Crossover: Events and Virtual Tourism

Let’s be honest; no one remembers a boring affair. It is not new news to anyone that lack of engagement can be a disaster recipe for any event, whether in-person, virtual, or hybrid. Therefore, in this day and age, when digital transformation is at its peak, you can have your event planned with crossover strategies such as building higher engagement with virtual tourism in a virtual event.

One way to blend a hybrid audience into your crossover strategy is by having attendees snap a selfie that they can impose on a branded background and share in the event later,  similar to a photo booth but in a virtual reality setting. Another way of keeping the audience engaged is by creating a social media-like feed that both the audience, in-person and virtual, can use to catchup with each other.

Virtual Event Planners to the Rescue

Coming up with a strategy like this is no big deal, but putting it up in action can cost you an arm and a leg. The good news is, event planners have also increased with the emergence of virtual reality. Multiple event planners take the entire schedule up on their hands. It includes creating a plan that can easily blend the VR tourism experience. One example of such event planners is vFairs. vFairs offers an event management, a platform with advanced features to cater all kinds of audiences for all kinds and sizes of events.

vFairs is well-equipped with advanced virtual event features that can keep your attendees hooked for a long time. Apart from seamlessly taking your virtual audience to an immersive virtual environment through 3D design virtual lobbies and auditoriums, the platform lets you gamify the experience to enhance the attendees’ experience. For instance, a virtual scavenger hunt on the event platform can help your audience pay attention to the event while also interacting with the content in a fun way.

The vFairs team, with its scavenger hunts and gamification features, directs the attendees toward places and event activities. These activities drive people to booths and help the exhibitors catch up with the interaction coming their way.

With vFairs, organizers can be highly creative as they want to achieve their primary goal of higher engagement and traffic. Here are some of the examples of how vFairs is best choice for a virtual tours and events:

Slovenian Tourist Board and vFairs

vFairs has helped the Slovenian Tourist Board with its successful event titled FEEL sLOVEni@ Business Date. The event was first hosted by different event-hosting platforms in September and December 2020. In April 2021, the board chose vFairs as their virtual event hosting partner. The conference’s goal was to offer a fantastic opportunity to establish business partnerships with foreign tour operators, virtual tour guides, tour agencies, and the tourism industry. All four of their virtual events, which included conferences,were a success with the help of vFairs.

While there are a good number of features that vFairs offers to create mesmerizing virtual events, the following features stood out:

Meeting scheduler: The feature helped connect buyers with delegates in a 15 minutes long meeting slot.

Exhibit booths: Over 120 buyer delegates met with 30 Slovenian tourism providers such as hotels, SPS & health resorts, DMC agencies, destinations, and more tourist attractions. All exhibitors had their branded booths ready to showcase their services and content.

Swag Bags: The virtual briefcases feature by vFairs enabled attendees to save all the documents in their online swag bags so that they can later share event takeaways with colleagues and friends.

Aligned with the above-mentioned virtual tourism  features, online conference video meetings and top-notch technical support by the vFairs team contributed heavily to making the event what it was.

OGC Virtual Property Trade Show and vFairs

In 2020, similar to other trade show organizers, OGC too was unable to kick start its usual trade show events for the year. The pandemic forced the shut down of in-person trade shows, leaving only virtual trade shows as a solution for OGC. The company contacted vFairs, one of the biggest virtual event platforms, to discuss their needs and requirements for a virtual version of the Your Overseas Home event.

Staying true to its vision, vFairs was able to bring all sorts of benefits to the ground for stakeholders of Your Overseas Home. The platform was easy for the attendees to use, which resulted in OGC’s higher demographic. The trade show was vibrant and arranged by location so visitors could easily view property experts relevant to them.

Moreover, the event remained online for 30 days so the visitor could return to the occasion whenever they wanted. The event included the need to fly to places to visit the property of their choice. Instead, attendees were delighted to connect with the choice of experts from the comfort of their homes. To sum up, vFairs proved to be an excellent choice to host virtual tradeshows.

Key Takeaways

Virtual tourism has become a dire need for modern-day businesses as the world approaches new ways of working, traveling, and hosting. Virtual event organizers can now make events more insightful, organized, and engaging and enhance the attendee experience by taking advantage of digital communication, technological development and trending virtual events ideas.

People want to do things that are new and exciting. Considering this, big names in event planning- vFairs, have already started serving their clients with virtual events and tourism crossover strategies.