Virtual tours for hotels, resorts and serviced apartments in Saudi Arabia

Photographs show the best angle; guests want the whole room

Hotel photography is a skilled craft, and it has a built-in limit. It is taken from the corner that flatters the room, with a lens that widens it, in the best light of the day. Guests know this and compensate by reading reviews, which means the hotel has lost control of how its rooms are described.

A well-made tour puts that control back. A guest standing inside the tour can see how far the bed is from the window, whether the sofa fits alongside the desk and what the balcony looks onto. They do not have to trust the angle, because they choose it. For a virtual tour for hotels Saudi Arabia operators build, that means fewer surprises on arrival and fewer questions to the reservations desk before it.

The same logic applies to resorts, where the question is distance, and to serviced apartments, where the question is whether a family can live in the unit for a month. We describe below how each case changes what the tour must show.

Capturing a tour in an occupied hotel

The practical difficulty is that hotels do not close. A tour team has to work around guests, housekeeping and events, and should plan the capture as an operation, not a photo shoot.

We work floor by floor, choosing vacant rooms that represent each category and shooting them after housekeeping has finished. Rooms are staged with the hotel's own standards: beds dressed, curtains open, nothing personal left out. No guests appear in frame. Shared areas are captured at quiet hours, and areas with their own rules, such as family sections, spas and prayer facilities, are handled according to the hotel's policy: captured empty with permission, or modelled rather than photographed.

Prayer facilities and their direction markers, ablution areas, family sections and accessible routes deserve a place in the tour, because they answer questions guests really have. A tour that shows them is one that respects the guest as well as selling to them.

On-site capture is scheduled property by property. A 360 virtual tour Riyadh hotel can open in a browser takes planning around the season; ask vendors how they handle peak periods and refurbishments.

Arabic first, and ready for everyone else

A tour for a Saudi property should be written in Arabic first, not translated from English as an afterthought. That means right-to-left labels, captions in natural Arabic and hotspots that still read correctly when the interface flips. English follows, and other languages can be added to the labels where the guest mix calls for them.

Where a tour includes a spoken guide, our avatars are built to work in several languages, which suits a hotel that hosts visitors from many countries. The same applies to a virtual tour Saudi Arabia travel agents and corporate buyers can open at their desks: the language of the tour should match the language of the decision-maker, not the language of the hotel's marketing department.

Put the tour where decisions are made

A tour on the website is the minimum. The better returns come from putting it in front of the person who makes the decision. For corporate buyers and event planners, a link in the proposal replaces a site visit for the first shortlist. For leisure travellers, it belongs on the booking page beside each room category.

In the lobby, the tour can run on a display managed from Nplay Beam, showing upcoming venues, restaurants and suites to guests who are already in the building. At a travel fair or roadshow, a Nplay Halo Box can carry the property as a life-size hologram concierge that answers questions in the visitor's language, the approach we describe in our post on hologram tour guides. Together these form a wider virtual tourism experience for a property or a destination, one that starts before arrival.