Forty stations, seven rooms, four working days
Hotel Nertili in Sarandë is 40 stations, 231 overlays, 229 navigation arrows and 97 distinct connections at 2.42 per station — the densest tour we have built above fourteen stations, and the one containing the single most connected panorama we have built, with nine destinations from one position. It carries no information popups at all, and that is why it shipped in four working days while a forty-eight-station university building took two weeks. Seven rooms are in it by number, covering four categories. Shooting the rest would have been padding.
A hotel with sixty rooms does not need sixty tours of a room. It needs every room a guest can be offered by name, plus enough of the building around them that the offer means something. That is the whole brief, and it is the difference between a forty-station job and a job three times the size that tells a guest nothing more.
Seven rooms, four categories
| Category | Rooms shot |
|---|---|
| Standard with sea view | 111, 213 |
| Deluxe with side sea view | 206, 303, 507 |
| Junior suite with side sea view | 312 |
| Superior suite with sea view | 401 |
Seven rooms across four categories. A guest offered 303 can stand in 303 rather than in something described as similar to it.
Two of the four categories got more than one room. That is not redundancy — three deluxe rooms with a side sea view are three genuinely different views, and the view is most of what a guest is choosing between. The categories where the room is the product got one station each; the categories where the position is the product got several.
Five of the seventeen named places are outdoors
Forty stations resolve to seventeen named places, and the approach takes a disproportionate share of them: the parking road, the parking entrance, the parking itself, the beachfront, and a junction between the bar, the parking and the sea. Add the restaurant, the Ulah bar and the gym and the guest rooms are a minority of the names in this tour.
That was deliberate. The anxieties a first-time guest actually has about a seafront hotel are where do I park, how far is the water and what is the walk between them like — and every one of those is answered outside the building. A tour that starts at reception has skipped the three questions the guest asked first.
Nine destinations from one panorama
| Counted | Value |
|---|---|
| Stations | 40 |
| Overlays in total | 231 |
| Navigation arrows | 229 |
| Distinct connections | 97 |
| Arrows collapsing as duplicates | 132 (57.6%) |
| Connections per station | 2.42 |
| Most connections from one panorama | 9 |
| Information popups | 0 |
| Named places | 17 |
Nine is the highest single-panorama figure anywhere in our archive; the next highest is seven, at a seventy-two-station apart-hotel. It is a consequence of shooting outdoors. Two of the seventeen named places in this tour are literally junctions — one between the restaurant and the bar, one between the bar, the parking and the sea — and in the open a junction has no walls to limit where you can go next. Indoors a doorway does that work for you.
The tour also duplicates heavily: 132 of its 229 arrows, 57.6%, lead somewhere already reachable. On an outdoor approach that is correct. A path you can walk in either direction needs an arrow at both ends, or half your visitors face a dead end that is not there.
No popups, and four working days
Every one of the 231 overlays here is navigation except two that are labels. There is no interpretation layer: nothing opens, nothing explains, nothing links out. Our published turnaround is three to five working days for most tours and this one landed in four.
What we would do differently
- Popups on the room categories. Four categories, seven rooms, and nothing in the tour says which is which except the station name. A single popup per room carrying the bed, the view and the floor would cost very little build time and would answer the question the tour exists to answer.
- A plan of the site, not of the building. The value here is the relationship between the parking, the hotel and the water. That is a site diagram rather than a floor plan, and it would do more for this tour than a plan of any single floor.
- Nothing about the station count. Forty is right. We would not add rooms, and we would resist a client who asked us to — the second standard-with-sea-view room is already the point at which extra stations stop telling a guest anything new.
Every number in this post was counted out of the delivered tour files rather than recalled. The tour is public and ungated, so any of them can be checked against it. What the job cost is between us and the client, and stays there — our rate card is published in full and the arithmetic is yours to do.
Questions people ask
- Does a hotel virtual tour need every room?
- No. It needs every room type a guest can be offered by name, plus the circulation and the approach around them. A seafront hotel in our published work took 40 stations covering seven rooms across four categories, reception, restaurant, bar, gym, the beachfront and the parking. Shooting sixty near-identical rooms would add cost and tell a guest nothing they did not already know from the type.
- How long does a 40-station tour take to deliver?
- Four working days, in this case, from capture day to handover. Our published turnaround is three to five working days for most tours and never less than three. What moves the date is the build on top of the photography — a 48-station tour carrying 81 information popups and two tracked floor plans took two weeks.
- Why shoot the car park and the road?
- Because they are what a first-time guest is anxious about. Where do I park, how far is the water, and what is the walk between them — all three are answered outside the building. In this tour five of the seventeen named places are outdoors, and one outdoor junction is the most connected position in the whole archive, offering nine destinations.
- Can popups be added to a tour after it is delivered?
- Yes. The information layer is separate build work over the same capture, so popups, descriptive photographs and extra languages can be added later without reshooting. Descriptive photographs are €10 each and an extra language layer is €100. What cannot be added later is a station — that needs the camera back in the building.
