MyVRONOS

Writing

What we have learned building virtual tours

Production logs from tours you can open right now, what our work costs and why, and what actually arrives at the end of a job. Written by the person who shot them.

Every number here is one of three things: counted out of a tour we delivered, calculated from our published rates, or cited to a named source with a date and a link. Where we do not know something, the post says so. We do not publish what a specific job cost a specific client — that is between us and them.

Start here

What you actually receive on the last day

The deliverable is a folder of files, not an account: panoramas, tiles, an entry HTML file and the code that runs them. Here is what is in it, and the two things about it we have not published yet. 8 min read

Self-hosted, white-labelled and hosted-for-you are three different things

Three arrangements share one vocabulary and differ on the only question that matters: what you hold when the relationship ends. Four tests that tell them apart before you sign. 6 min read

A 360° platform’s domain was sold in May 2023. Its buyer says it has no connection to the old accounts.

Platform risk is not a hypothesis in this field. It has a date, a published notice and one sentence you can read today. Here is exactly what it says, and what it does not. 6 min read

What you own

What actually arrives at the end of a job, and what it means to own it.

Owning a tour for five years against renting one

The comparison is not free against paid. It is one capital cost plus your own hosting against a recurring one plus somebody else’s continuity — and self-hosting has a bill too. 7 min read

You are paying every month for a tour you cannot move

If you already have a tour, still pay for it monthly, and could not take it anywhere: what to ask, what an export really contains, and what a rebuild actually involves. 6 min read

What happens to your tour if we stop trading

A one-person studio is a real supplier risk. Nine questions to ask any supplier about continuity, our answers to five of them, and the four we have not written down yet. 6 min read

Google Street View is not your virtual tour

Street View publication is durable, free to keep and worth buying. It is also a channel inside somebody else’s product rather than a deliverable you hold. Buy both, in that order. 7 min read

What you receive, and where you keep it

The tour is handed over as a self-contained folder of files: panoramas, an entry page, the code that runs it, and your own logos and plans. No account, no expiry. 5 min read

What it costs

The rate card, what moves it, and how to work out the shape of your own job.

What a 360° tour costs in Albania, and how to work out your own

€40 for each of the first ten photographs, €30 for each one after, a €160 minimum — and a method for turning that into a number for your own building before you call anyone. 8 min read

Why we price per photograph and never per square metre

Two branches of one bakery, one brief, one city: seven camera positions at the first and four at the second. Floor area does not predict what a tour costs. 6 min read

Why the eleventh photograph costs less, and the €100 that was always in the price

A graduated tariff and an all-units discount sound identical when spoken aloud, and only one of them is safe. Ours is graduated, and the arithmetic exposes a fixed charge we had never stated. 6 min read

€0.50 a hotspot means about €1.07 a station

Analytics is metered per distinct navigation connection, not per arrow. Across seventeen delivered tours, 1,441 arrows collapse to 696 connections — a 51.7% reduction in the billable count. 7 min read

The ten priced extras, and when each one is a waste of money

Every extra on our rate card, what it is actually for, and the case against buying it — plus what our own published tours show about which ones get bought at all. 8 min read

Why we counted the hotspots instead of estimating them

Every figure in this section came out of the delivered tour files by script rather than from memory. This is what it reads, what the three different hotspot numbers mean, and what the counting caught. 7 min read

Three to five working days — except the one that took two weeks

Turnaround is driven by what is built on top of the capture, not by how many photographs it contains. A 40-station hotel shipped in four days; a 48-station university building took two weeks. 6 min read

The statistics this industry repeats, and why we will not

Six figures every virtual tour company quotes, what happened when we tried to open the source of each one, and the counted numbers we publish instead. 7 min read

What we could find out about 360° capture prices around the Adriatic

A price check that mostly reports absence. Nobody in Albania publishes a tour price, and the one public anchor we found on this coast is from 2019. 6 min read

What a 360° tour costs here, in the plainest terms we can put it

€40 for each of the first ten 360° photographs, €30 for each one after that, a €160 minimum, VAT on top, and nothing to pay once the files are handed over. 6 min read

How many 360° photographs a space needs, and why floor area will not tell you

Eleven delivered spaces came to between 4 and 72 360° photographs. Floor area does not predict the count — sightlines and what the tour has to show do. 5 min read

The delivered work

Production logs from tours that are published and open in a browser right now.

The delivered work

324 stations, 1,441 arrows, 696 connections: what seventeen delivered tours contain

Every station, overlay, navigation arrow and distinct connection in seventeen published Vronos tours, counted out of the delivered files and published in full. 8 min read

The delivered work

What your building will take: station counts from seventeen delivered tours

Station counts for every building type we have delivered — apart-hotel, hotel, university, campsite, hostel, restaurant, bakery, shop and apartment — with no square-metre rule anywhere. 7 min read

The delivered work

Seventy-two stations in a sixteen-apartment building: inside the Fenix tour

A production log from the largest tour we have published: how sixteen near-identical apartments were covered, and why 429 navigation arrows collapse to 155 connections. 6 min read

The delivered work

Sixty-four stations in Budva, and the only aerial in the archive

A production log from a whole hotel in Montenegro, basement to third floor — and the one project where a drone flew, with an exact statement of what that does and does not mean. 7 min read

The delivered work

Eighty-one popups and two tracked floor plans: the university building

The most information-dense tour we have built, and an honest account of where two weeks of build time went when the photography took a fraction of it. 7 min read

The delivered work

Forty stations, seven rooms, four working days

A seafront hotel walked from the parking road to the water, and the argument for shooting every room type rather than every room. 5 min read

The delivered work

Seven apartments, seven tours, four to six stations each

How a development with repeated stock was captured: seven separate tours, none larger than six stations, and the three lowest connection densities in our archive. 6 min read

The delivered work

A campsite in twenty-nine stations and a capsule hostel in fourteen

Two accommodation types nobody publishes capture data for: what changes when there are no walls to structure a route, and when the room is smaller than the camera wants. 6 min read

The delivered work

The same bakery, twice: why one branch took seven stations and the other four

One client, one brief, one city, two premises, two different station counts — the cleanest controlled comparison in our archive, with both tours live and open. 7 min read

For your sector

Written for one kind of building and one kind of buyer at a time.

For your sector

A hotel GM’s brief: what a 360° tour is for, and what it is not for

Written for the person who owns occupancy and rate: what a room-by-room tour settles before a guest calls, what it will not do, and what our three delivered hotels actually contain. 8 min read

For your sector

Direct bookings against OTA commission: where a tour actually sits

A tour is a one-time cost and commission is a recurring one. Here is the arithmetic to do with your own contract in front of you, and why we will not publish a commission rate we cannot source. 7 min read

For your sector

A university marketing officer’s brief: open days, wayfinding and procurement

What an institution actually buys: the rooms an open day cannot get people into, a plan that tracks where you are standing, and a file that survives a change of agency. 7 min read

For your sector

Seven stations and twenty-seven popups: a restaurant tour that explains the menu

Restorant Menca is seven 360° photographs carrying twenty-seven information popups. In a room this size the writing is most of the build, not the walking. 6 min read

For your sector

Six stations, shot at night, with the shop open

A seafront shop needed six 360° photographs and got six. The night shoot was chosen rather than tolerated, and padding the count would have misrepresented the premises. 6 min read

For your sector

What a web agency should know before quoting a client a virtual tour

The deliverable is a static folder your client can host themselves. What that changes about what you can promise, and how to estimate the price before you call us. 8 min read

For your sector

When a virtual tour is the wrong purchase

Six situations where we would tell you to wait, to buy something else, or to keep your money — written by the studio that would otherwise be taking it. 8 min read

For your sector

Can a wheelchair user assess your building before they travel to it?

What a 360° tour settles for someone planning a journey, what it cannot settle at any price, and what an extra capture pass at seated height would add. 7 min read

For your sector

Virtual tours for restaurants and bakeries: three we have delivered

Two bakery branches and a self-service restaurant came to 4, 7 and 7 360° photographs. The size of the job is small; the variable is what the tour explains. 5 min read

Albanian market

Capturing places in Albania and along the Adriatic coast.

Albanian market

Nobody in this market publishes what a virtual tour costs. We do.

Every 360° provider we could find serving Albania keeps its prices behind a phone call, so here is our entire rate card and what publishing it costs us. 8 min read

Albanian market

Buying an apartment in Albania from abroad: what a tour proves, and what it hides

A 360° tour of an Albanian apartment settles layout, light and finish on the day it was shot, and settles nothing at all about title, damp, noise or the neighbours. 9 min read

Albanian market

Virtual tours in Sarandë: two hotels, 112 stations and not one popup between them

Two hotels in Sarandë at 72 stations and 40 — what the work in this town has actually involved, and what our travel policy means this far south. 6 min read

Albanian market

Virtual tours in Vlorë: ten delivered tours, from a four-station flat to a capsule hostel

Ten of our seventeen published tours are in Vlorë — apartments, a capsule hostel, a self-service restaurant and a shop shot at night, every one of them live. 6 min read

Albanian market

Virtual tours in Tirana: 59 stations, 93 popups and no travel charge

Three delivered tours in our home city — a university building and the same bakery twice — plus the one commercial advantage of shooting where we already are. 6 min read

Albanian market

The two sectors we list and have not yet shot

Our Solutions menu names six sectors and the published archive covers four, so here is exactly what is missing, what would carry over, and what we would have to learn. 8 min read

Albanian market

Direct bookings against commission: the arithmetic, and what we will not claim

A tour is paid once; commission recurs every season. Here is how to do that sum with your own numbers — and why we publish no booking-uplift percentage at all. 6 min read

How we work

How the work is done, in enough detail to check it.

How long it takes, from capture day to handover

Three to five working days for most tours and never less than three. Features move the date far more than the number of photographs does — one job took four days, another two weeks. 5 min read