What your building will take: station counts from seventeen delivered tours
There is no square-metres-per-station figure, and anyone who hands you one is guessing. What we can give you instead is what seventeen real tours actually took: four stations for a bakery branch, six for a seafront shop, seven for a restaurant, fourteen for a capsule hostel, twenty-nine for a coastal campsite, forty for a seafront hotel, forty-eight for a university building, sixty-four for a hotel over four levels, seventy-two for a sixteen-apartment building, and four to six for each of seven apartments. Find yours between two of them.
Almost every enquiry arrives with the same request underneath it: give me a number per square metre so I can work this out myself. Two providers in this region price that way, so buyers arrive primed to ask. We will not, and the reason is not commercial.
It is not accurate. One station can be even more or less than that depending on the architecture of the building or the goal of the Virtual Tour.
Both halves of that sentence matter. Architecture sets how many positions it takes to see a space without blind corners — a 40 m² gallery with eight sightlines needs more than a 200 m² warehouse with two. What the tour has to do sets the rest: a hotel that sells room types by number needs a station in each of them whether or not the floor area asks for one. Area predicts neither.
What ten buildings actually took
| Building | Where | Stations | What the count had to cover |
|---|---|---|---|
| Apart-hotel, four floors | Sarandë | 72 | 16 apartments by number, halls on all four floors, entrance, terrace |
| Hotel, basement to third floor | Budva | 64 | 7 rooms by number with bathrooms and balconies separate, lobby, restaurant, bar, yard, rehab centre, every stair and landing |
| University building, two floors | Tirana | 48 | Library, auditorium, five numbered labs, robotics lab, five classrooms, five office areas, every corridor junction |
| Seafront hotel | Sarandë | 40 | 7 rooms across four categories, reception, restaurant, bar, gym, beachfront, the parking approach |
| Coastal campsite | Jalë | 29 | 4 stay types from the inside, restaurant, gastro bar, beach bar, shower and toilet blocks, the paths between them |
| Capsule hostel | Vlorë | 14 | The sleeping capsules, main entrance, both inner entries, hallway, two bathrooms |
| Self-service restaurant | Vlorë | 7 | Both entrances, the counter, the till, indoor dining, outdoor seating, the street |
| Bakery and coffee house | Tirana | 7 | Street view, entrance, front desk, coffee lounge, dining area, the hall to the back wall |
| Seafront shop | Vlorë | 6 | The frontage onto the promenade and the interior, shot at night with the shop trading |
| Bakery and coffee house, second branch | Tirana | 4 | The frontage, two positions inside the room, the toilets |
Counted from the delivered tours, all of which are public. Prices are not published against a building — see the rate card for what the tariff does with any of these numbers.
Seven apartments, seven tours, never one number
One development in Vlorë accounts for seven of our seventeen tours. They were delivered as seven separate folders, because a buyer is being sold one specific unit and a show flat is not that unit. They are listed separately here for the same reason.
| Tour | Stations | Connections | Popups |
|---|---|---|---|
| No. 31, tower 3 | 6 | 10 | 2 |
| No. 15, tower 3 | 5 | 8 | 6 |
| No. 29, tower 2 | 5 | 12 | 5 |
| No. 36, tower 2 | 5 | 12 | 3 |
| No. 35, tower 3 | 4 | 8 | 5 |
| No. 14, tower 2 | 4 | 6 | 3 |
| No. 38, tower 3 | 4 | 8 | 2 |
Do not add these together. There is no combined apartment job here — there are seven tours, quoted, built and handed over one at a time.
The three things that actually set the count
- Sightlines, not floor area
- A station exists to remove a blind corner. One square room needs one. An L-shaped room needs two. A long hall needs two or three whatever its area, and a large open hall may need fewer than a small building with eight rooms off a corridor.
- Anything you sell by its own name
- Room 303, apartment 405, Lab 4, the junior suite. If a customer will be offered it by name, it needs a station, because the entire point is that they stand in the one they were offered rather than in something that resembles it.
- The joins
- Corridors, stair landings and junctions carry no product and still need stations, or the walk breaks. At the campsite three stations exist purely to make an outdoor route continuous: a stone road, a wooden path and a junction with nothing at it.
Count your own in ten minutes
Walk it and stop where you would stop
Take the route you take when you show the place to somebody in person. Every place you naturally stop and turn around is one station. Write the list down as you go.
Add a station for every blind corner
Anywhere the room continues past what you can see from where you are standing: an L-shape, a bend, a mezzanine, a bar with a back area behind it.
Add everything you sell by name
Every room type, every unit number, every named facility. Not every room — every room a customer will be offered by name.
Add the approach
The street outside, the entrance, the car park. Five of the seventeen named places in our seafront-hotel tour are outdoors, and the approach is often what a first-time visitor is most anxious about.
Add the joins
Corridors, landings, junctions. On a two-floor building this is usually more than people expect: the university tour carries a named junction on almost every corridor.
Check the floor
Below four stations it is not a tour, it is a set of 360° photographs — a different product. Four stations is the smallest job we build and the €160 minimum is simply what four costs.
Then send us the number. We check it against the building, not against your arithmetic, and you get a station count and a fixed price rather than a discovery call — tell us what you want people to walk through. If you would rather see what the tariff does with a count first, it is all on the pricing page, and the argument for the unit itself is in why we price per photograph and never per square metre.
Every station count in this post was counted out of the delivered tour files. None was supplied by a client, estimated from a plan, or rounded to look tidy.
Questions people ask
- How many 360° photographs does a hotel need?
- Two delivered hotels give the range. A seafront hotel took 40 stations: seven rooms across four categories, reception, restaurant, bar, gym, the beachfront and the parking approach. A four-level hotel with a basement took 64, because bathrooms and balconies were given their own stations and every stair and landing was walked. A hotel does not need every room — it needs every room type a guest can be offered by name, plus the circulation between them.
- How many stations does a small restaurant or cafe need?
- Four to seven, on the evidence of three delivered tours. A self-service restaurant took seven: both entrances, the counter, the till, indoor dining, the outdoor area and the street. One bakery and coffee house took seven; its second branch took four. Anyone quoting a small restaurant forty stations is quoting it a hotel.
- Why will you not give me a price per square metre?
- Because floor area does not predict the work. A 40 m² gallery with a six-metre ceiling and eight sightlines needs more stations than a 200 m² warehouse, so a square-metre rate would overcharge the warehouse and undercharge the gallery. Vronos prices per 360° photograph — €40 for each of the first ten, €30 for each one after, with a €160 minimum — because that is the unit that actually costs time.
- What is the smallest tour you will build?
- Four stations. Below that it is a set of 360° photographs rather than a walkthrough — a different product with a different price. Four stations is where the €160 minimum comes from, and a real four-station job is in our published work: a bakery branch covered by its frontage, two interior positions and the toilets.
- Can you tell me the count before you visit?
- Usually yes, from a floor plan or a walk-through video and a short conversation about what the tour has to do. The count is fixed in the quote before anything is booked, and the quote does not move unless the scope does.
