Travel is ‘perfect’ for marketing with virtual reality

From Travel Weekly

Gordon Meyer, director of virtual reality (VR) company YouVisit, will tell you that travel is the ideal space for the technology to make an impact because it provides a visual medium to showcase destinations and experiences that is far more vivid and experiential than flat, two-dimensional media.

“The pairing of travel and VR just makes so much sense,” he said. “It’s a perfect-use case for VR.”

The industry is taking note and beginning to test VR programs. For example, Meyer’s company has worked with several destinations to create VR content, and Ascape, another VR company, is also working with travel brands, providing virtual tours of destinations for companies like JetBlue.

VR is in the early stages of making its way into the agency space, as well. Ascape recently partnered with Thomas Cook, curating a collection of VR tours for the agency, and Virtuoso has begun a limited beta test, placing high-end headsets in some member agencies.

“It’s an evolution of marketing platforms,” said Tony Corneto, Virtuoso’s director of user experience. “You started with books, and then you moved to photographs, and then you moved to video, and then you’re now moving to VR. It has the potential, depending on who you talk to about this, to have quite a sea change in terms of engaging people in all different ways, whether it’s in-agency or with the motion picture industry or whatever the case may be. I think there’s a lot of opportunities to inspire people.”

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