Travelers have a never-ending amount of choices where to  go on holiday – which makes the decision hard and popular  destinations have the advantage of already existing awareness. For less well-known destinations (or tourists activities), VR marketing simplifies the decision-making process by giving a “try before you buy” experience in providing trials.

An important question pops up:

How to design the VR experience? How to leave an impressive trial, so the potential customers would positively remember the product and become actual customers? 

Certain settings in VR or 360° videos can create a more memorable experience because the virtual environment is seen as a place rather than a sequence of images. When people decide which destination  to visit, they tend to choose the place they like over another. And here, visual and auditory settings help  to sharpen and improve the experience of that place. If the settings are optimized, it would make the VR experience more appealing to potential customers, as a result, they like the destination more, despite not having been there physically.

As for tourism businesses, VR is an increasingly important marketing tool to spread product messages and pre-visit images of the destination to motivate people to travel to there, they need to know how to best create such a video in order to gain the attention of the possible travelers and make them remember  the destination (i.e., learning effect).

In a latest research, it was found out that only auditory or auditory/visual guidance supplementing the VR video content makes no difference in the learning  outcome. Also, it points out that the use of auditory guidance only lead to a higher overall satisfaction of the viewers because the users perceive a higher understandability and usefulness of information. Moreover, it leads to an easier finding of desired points of interest.

Thus, you need to consider if a personal guide in the video is even needed – Maybe the personal guide captures all the  viewers’ attention and it is harder for them to concentrate    on the content.

And that is exactly what you as tourism business want – to have to most effective outcome of the VR video and the highest memory value of the customers for your product or destination.

Mix of personal guide and auditory-only guidance:

Watch our making-of on YouTube: