PHOENIX—As part of Best Western Hotels & Resorts’ virtual reality (VR) experience, the brand is providing an immersive 360-degree look into all of the company’s North American hotels.
Through the Best Western Virtual Reality Experience (BWVRE), a virtual reality tour of nearly 2,000 properties is available.
Best Western is the first major company of its size and scale to utilize this cutting-edge technology in this way, setting a new industry standard for how virtual reality can be used to enhance the consumer journey, according to the company.
The VR tours offer a guided 3D video of the hotels including narration and music, with videos ranging in length from 50 seconds to two minutes. Videos can be accessed on the brand’s YouTube channel–bestwesternTV.
“Before even stepping foot on the property, guests will be able to view guest rooms, lobbies and amenities, as if they were there in person,” said Dorothy Dowling, CMO and SVP of Best Western Hotels & Resorts. “Best Western is a first-mover in this effort, and we know our guests and our hotels will benefit from this game-changing technology.”
For the past three years, Best Western has worked in partnership with Google Street View to gather 1.7 million photos of its nearly 2,000 North American hotels, paving the way for the BWVRE, according to the company. BWVRE videos were developed in 8K resolution, the current highest ultra-high definition video available.
BWVRE will be available on all platforms that are supported by HTML5, such as Google Maps, Google Search, YouTube and Facebook. This method allows the broadest distribution for these video assets and the ability for Best Western to continue to enhance the experience over time, according to the company.