IT Week: As co-founder of 360Travelguide.com, can you explain the genesis of the company?
Conrad Freethy: We began six years ago, offering hotel chains virtual city tours for their websites. We built up a library of about 3,000 tours of various cities worldwide and for the past two or three years we have licensed these under the 360Travelguide brand to tour operators and travel agents, in addition to hotels. We are now expanding our library with virtual tours of hotels and resorts, which we will also make available under licence.
You've just completed a deal with RedSkyIT, what will this achieve?
We will provide our 360Travelpack - which offers city and resort images, descriptive text and interactive maps - to their customer base of travel agents. If an agent is booking a holiday for a client, they can now show the customer our product and bring the destination to life. It's also a great tool for training agents, so that even if they have not been to a location in person they can still appear informed about it.
What are the advantages of your virtual tour libraries for travel firms?
It is much more cost effective to use our library than to produce your own promotional videos [and post them]. It's interactive, sticky content at a significantly lower price; we already have 500 hotels signed up. Virtual tours are excellent instructive content and, compared with videos, they are more objective. Videos only show the best parts of a hotel, but in a tour users can interact and go where they like. You can really get a feel for the location, so it lowers the barriers for booking.
Might users find they have problems navigating round sites with virtual tours?
No, they are reasonably small file sizes, although there are still some problems in terms of buffering. The files are also Java compatible, so no downloads are required for the majority of users.
How can virtual tours boost the popularity of sites?
The "content is king" concept is still relevant in the travel industry; it is important to get people to your web site, keep hold of their attention and encourage them to make a booking. But on the negative side, many sites try to put up Google Maps, videos and other things that can make users' computers crash and turn people away. According to some research, the average web site gets about three or four page views before the visitor leaves. Yahoo gets about 14 and our Travel guide has about 15 page views per user, so it proves people are interested in it.
How are you innovating your virtual tours?
We're combining them with interactive maps and descriptive texts so the user can guide themselves round the featured cities, allowing users to see where both the hotels and the attractions are. We are now looking beyond the travel industry and have started producing virtual tours for BBC Gardening, Lifestyle and History.
About Conrad Freethy
Freethy is the co-founder and managing director 360TravelGuide.com
He has worked across a number of sectors for companies including Xerox and travel giant TUI. His roles included yield management, web strategy and development and due diligence prior to acquisitions.
He holds a BA (Hons) in European Business Administration as well as a diploma in management studies from Reims Management School in France.
