A traveller decides before arriving, with questions a brochure cannot answer
A family choosing between two desert camps, a couple comparing Red Sea resorts, a group of hikers deciding whether a canyon suits everyone. Each is making a decision with incomplete information, and each has the same questions: how large is it, how crowded, how hard, what will the room be like, will it suit our age and ability.
A virtual tour Jordan visitors can open on a phone answers many of these before the booking. It does not replace the visit. It makes the visit more likely to match what the traveller hoped for. The market is moving in this direction: virtual tours are projected to grow from about USD 0.96 billion in 2023 to about USD 8.4 billion by 2030 (27.9% CAGR), per Allied Market Research as cited in Nplay's market brief. Travel is among the most natural places for that growth to show.
We work from our Amman studio, with a team that also works in Riyadh, and this guide draws on how we plan tourism tours for both countries.
Who needs which kind of tour
A destination hub
One page per region or site, each with a tour, short copy and links onwards. It gives travellers a starting point, and gives the board one asset that can also run on stands abroad and on kiosks in visitor centres.
The itinerary as a tour
Each day of a trip as a sequence of views: the hotel room, the meeting point, the vehicle, the trail, the dinner. It lets a buyer see what the price includes and helps a sales agent explain it.
Accurate, respectful capture
Spaces captured to the conservator's rules, with scripts approved by historians. The tour reaches people who will never visit and prepares those who will.
An honest preview of effort
Trails, canyons, dive sites and camps, shown with the difficulty and the conditions. It helps people choose the right trip and arrive prepared.
What each audience needs
| Audience | Format | Where it is shown | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tourism board | 360 tours per site, linked on one destination page | Board website, visitor centres, fairs abroad | Consistent style across sites; one owner for updates |
| Tour operator | Day-by-day tour with hotspots and audio | Sales page, agent presentations, email | Keep it in step with what the trip actually offers |
| Heritage site | 360 capture, 3D for lost or restricted areas | Site website, schools, international audiences | Permissions, light limits and accuracy of scripts |
| Adventure site | 360 photo and short 360 video for moving routes | Site and operator pages, social links | Safety, weather and file size on mobile data |
| Hotel or camp | 360 tour of rooms and grounds | Booking page and operator pages | Show the rooms guests actually get |
Outdoor sites are harder than interiors
Indoors, we control the light and the crowd. Outdoors, neither holds still. Sun angle changes every few minutes, wind moves the camera, dust and heat affect equipment and crew, and visitors walk through the frame. A desert camp at dawn and the same camp at noon are different pictures.
Plan around it. Shoot in the best light windows, with permission from the authority that manages the site, including for any aerial capture. Choose stills for places people will study, and short 360 video for experiences that move, such as a boat crossing or a walk through a narrow canyon. Where the season changes the place, capture more than once. Keep the tour light, because many travellers will open it on mobile data in a hotel lobby, and show the real difficulty of a route, steps and gradients included. An honest preview should bring you better-matched guests, and we would rather build that than a glossy one.
For operators: make the itinerary walkable
Operators sell trust. A tour of each stop tells a buyer more than a paragraph of adjectives: the rooms they will sleep in, the vehicle, the landing point, the lunch spot. Add short audio notes from a guide, a hotspot with what the price includes and an enquiry button, so the buyer can ask about that stop.
The same production feeds other uses. The views can run on a screen at a travel fair, and a Halo Box can present the destination on a stand, with an avatar answering in the visitor's language. Our post on hologram tour guides for destination marketing explains that side. For hotels and camps, see virtual tours for hotels, and for museums and monuments our guide to virtual museum and heritage tours in Jordan.
A virtual tourism experience for Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia is building a new destination offer, from heritage to coast to desert, and the audience is international and multilingual from day one. A virtual tourism experience Saudi Arabia can offer should do three things: show places honestly, speak Arabic first and other languages well, and travel with the brand to fairs and visitor centres.
That is the same set of skills described above, at a larger scale. A tour per site, hosted and maintained by a named owner; a destination hub; a hologram or avatar guide for stands; and, for the longer term, richer 3D experiences. Our tourism destinations use case sets out how we would deploy the programme for a destination authority. Where something is a concept or a proposal rather than a delivered project, we say so. The tours themselves are available now.
Virtual tour Jordan: frequently asked questions
Does a virtual tour replace visiting a site?
No. It gives travellers enough to choose well and prepares them to arrive informed. For many sites it also reaches people who can never visit in person.
Can you capture places with difficult access, like canyons or remote camps?
Often, yes. Access, weather and permissions decide the plan, and we agree them with the site's managers first. Some places need a short 360 video instead of stills, or capture in more than one season.
Do you build a virtual tour Jordan operators can change themselves?
We build for updating: itineraries change, so text, hotspots and prices can be edited without rebuilding the tour. We agree in the project who does it and how fast.
Can tours be in several languages?
Yes. We build Arabic and English as standard, with a right-to-left Arabic layout, and add other languages on request for the markets you want to reach.