A hotel GM’s brief: what a 360° tour is for, and what it is not for
A 360° tour earns its place in a hotel when it lets a guest tell one room from another before they book. Our three delivered hotels are built that way — rooms shown by their own numbers, not by a representative photograph of something similar. It will not fix your rate positioning, it measures nothing, and there is no aerial station in the sky. Every number below is counted out of a tour you can open in a browser right now.
The job the tour actually does
A guest deciding between a standard room with a sea view and a deluxe with a side sea view is trying to answer one question: is the difference worth the difference in price. Your website answers it with two photographs shot from the two best corners of two different rooms, which is not the same question. A tour answers it by letting them stand in both.
At Hotel Nertili seven of the published station names are room numbers with their view category attached — 111 and 213 standard with sea view, 206, 303 and 507 deluxe with side sea view, 312 junior suite, 401 superior suite. Seventeen of the forty stations are published by name on the project page. A guest being offered 303 stands in 303, and a receptionist on the phone can send them a link to it instead of describing it.
What three delivered hotels contain
| Property | Stations | Navigation arrows | Distinct connections | What is shown by number |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fenix Apart-Hotel, Sarandë | 72 | 429 | 155 | 16 apartments across four floors |
| Hotel Moskva, Budva | 64 | 211 | 126 | 7 guest rooms, basement to third floor |
| Hotel Nertili, Sarandë | 40 | 229 | 97 | 7 guest rooms, parking road to beachfront |
Counted out of the delivered tour files, not estimated. An arrow is one arrow in one panorama; a distinct connection is one destination, however many arrows point at it — the difference is set out in [arrows, connections and popups](/academy/arrows-and-connections).
Seven rooms, four sold categories, one deliberate omission
The seven Nertili rooms in the tour fall into four categories a guest is actually offered: standard with sea view, deluxe with side sea view, junior suite, superior suite. The tour is not every room in the building — the numbers in it run from 111 to 507. What was shot was enough of each category for a guest to see what they are being sold, and no more, because our unit is the photograph and every extra one is another line on the invoice.
The exception is a property where the units genuinely differ from each other. Fenix is sixteen apartments and all sixteen are in the tour by their own numbers — 202, 204, 205, 301, 302, 305, 306, 401, 402, 403, 405, 406, 501, 502, 503 and 504 — because a guest booking 403 is booking 403 and not a category.
That decision is worth more to you than it is to us. It is the difference between a quote you can defend to an owner and a quote that looks like it was written straight off the fire register.
The circulation is the part that gets cut first
The Nertili tour does not stop at the room doors. The parking road, the parking entrance, the parking itself, reception, the restaurant, the gym, the Ulah bar, the stretch between the bar and the sea, and the beachfront are all stations in it. Hotel Moskva does the same vertically — the stairs and landings of every floor from the basement to the third, plus the lobby, the restaurant, the bar and its outside yard, and the rehabilitation and massage centre.
Circulation is the first thing a client asks to cut, because it is not a room and it does not sell. It is also the part that answers the questions a guest is quietly anxious about before a long drive: where do I park, how far is the water, is there a step, what does the front of the building look like at the moment I arrive. Moskva runs to 64 stations partly because the answer to “can I get from the bar to my floor” is a route rather than a photograph, and a route costs stations.
What it is not for
- It will not move your rate. A tour changes what a guest knows before they book. It does not change what the market will pay for the room.
- It does not replace your distribution photography. The channels you list on have their own image specifications and their own crops. A tour sits on your site, in your replies and on your Business Profile, alongside those photographs rather than instead of them.
- It measures nothing. There is no dimension in a 360° photograph you can rely on. If somebody needs a room’s measurements, that is a drawn floor plan, which is a separate product on the rate card.
- There is no 360° aerial. We have no 360° drone and we will not imply otherwise. Aerial means conventional stills and video, priced at €15 a photograph, and it has been flown on exactly one delivered project.
- It does not answer questions. A tour with an enquiry route that nobody staffs is a tour nobody books through. Someone still has to reply the same day.
What it costs to find out
The unit is one 360° photograph — one station, one position we shoot from. €40 for each of the first ten, €30 for each one after that, a €160 minimum because four stations is the smallest tour we build, and VAT on top. Travel within 25 km of our base in Tirana is not charged; beyond that it is billed at cost with no markup, itemised and agreed in writing before anything is booked, and accommodation is at cost with receipts on jobs that need more than one day on site. Both Sarandë properties above sit well outside that radius, and both had those lines on the quote before the shoot.
You can price your own property from the counts in the table above and the rate card in about a minute. We do not publish what any of these hotels paid — that is between us and them — but the arithmetic is yours to do.
What to send us
The room types, not the rooms
One line per sellable category. If two categories are visually identical, say so and we will shoot one.
The route a guest takes
From where they park or arrive to the door of their room. That list is usually longer than people expect and it is what makes the tour navigable.
The spaces that sell the stay
Restaurant, bar, spa, pool, terrace, the beach if you have one. These are the stations guests linger on and the reason a hotel tour is not just a room tour.
Your access windows
Which rooms are free on which mornings, and whether you would rather we worked around occupancy. We shoot around you rather than closing the building, but a room has to be empty and made up at the moment we stand in it.
Send that to contact and you get a station count, a scope and a fixed price. Not a discovery call.
Questions people ask
- How many 360° photographs does a hotel need?
- It depends on how many room categories you sell and how much of the approach and the public areas you want covered, not on floor area. For scale: a 40-station tour of a seafront hotel covered seven guest rooms plus the parking road, reception, restaurant, gym, bar and beachfront. A 64-station tour of a whole hotel covered seven rooms plus the lobby, restaurant, bar, outside yard, rehabilitation centre and the stairs and landings of four levels. A 16-apartment apart-hotel came to 72 stations because every apartment was shot individually. We set the count with you before anything is booked.
- Should we shoot every room, or one of each category?
- One of each category, unless the units genuinely differ from each other. Shooting near-identical rooms adds photographs to an invoice priced per photograph without adding anything a guest can act on. In one delivered seafront hotel, seven rooms covering four sold categories were captured out of a building numbered up to 507. The exception is apartments and suites let individually by number, where a guest is booking a specific unit rather than a category — there, every unit is worth its own stations, which is why a sixteen-apartment property has all sixteen in its tour.
- Will a virtual tour increase our bookings?
- We do not know, and nobody in this industry has published a figure we could check. We do not have access to your booking data and we will not claim a result we did not measure. What a tour demonstrably does is let a guest see the specific room they are being offered before they commit, and give your staff something to send instead of describing a room over the phone. Whether that converts is your number to measure, not ours to assert.
- Can you shoot while the hotel is occupied?
- Yes. We shoot around occupancy rather than closing the building, and most spaces stay in use while we work. Each room has to be empty and made up for the few minutes we are standing in it, so it is a scheduling exercise: you tell us which rooms are free on which mornings and we build the day around that. The schedule is agreed before the booking, not improvised on the day, and if a job needs more than one day on site the accommodation line is in your quote before you sign it.
- Do you shoot 360° from the air?
- No. There is no 360° drone in the studio and we do not imply there is one. We shoot conventional aerial stills and video, priced at €15 per photograph, and that has been flown on exactly one delivered project so far. If an aerial station in the sky is what you need, we are not the studio for that part of the job and we will tell you so before you book.
