Currently a lapsed technology journalist and PR deserter, I’m a writer with interests in travel, science, astronomy, fiction, primates, and consumer technology.

Aug 30, 2016

5x5 Travel Tuesday: Five ways the travel industry is promoting itself with virtual reality

Virtual reality may be the future of video, or it could be a white elephant like 3D TV, but it’s certainly being used by a lot of people. I wrote a feature on the travel industry’s use of virtual reality as a marketing tool for the Jumeirah resort group’s guest magazine. Sadly you won’t see it unless you’re staying in one of their swanky hotels, but I thought it was a pretty cool travel topic, so here’s the 5x5 edition, which has the bonus of being able to mention their competitors!

1Flights of fancy UAE-based airline Etihad went one step further and hired actor Nicole Kidman (reductively described as a “leggy red head” by the Daily Mail) for a VR promotion of its luxurious A380 airliners, which are equipped with an airborne three-room suite and an in-flight lounge for business class customers. It looks nice, but it’s questionable how many regular flyers will switch to Etihad, knowing that the extra space on their flying double-decker is making life easier for the people upstairs instead of giving them a few inches of extra legroom. It was an impressive production taking six months to shoot in an A380 converted into a subtly cutaway film set to accommodate the 360-degree cameras and invisible lighting. Personally, I’d just use the A380’s extra space for a Crying Zone, where passengers with small children can have more space for cots and crawling, in exchange for peace for the rest of the plane.

2 Immersive brochures Jumeirah got Google in to produce a VR walkthrough of its flagship hotel, the Burj Al Arab in Jumeirah, a sail-shaped landmark on the Dubai coastline. It’s packed with detail and slick video links, although I found it a bit detached, and that luxury penthouse suite has so much baroque glitz that Lawrence Llewellyn-Bowen would cringe. And they seemed to miss the easy win of a 360-degree waterslide ride in the Jumeirah-owned Wild Wadi theme park next door.

Rival group Marriott is already its second round of VR-based marketing. The first part was all about showing off a resort in Hawaii and its facilities at Tower 42 in London, using a ‘4D Teleporter’ booth that combined Oculus VR headsets with heat lamps, fans, scents, moving floors and water sprays. The latest videos are more about creating a feel-good buzz for guests, taking them on short tours in Chile, Rwanda and Beijing where the Marriott brand is very low-key. Still, if you’re in a Marriott hotel, ask if they’ve got the VRoom Service, and you’ll be able to try out a Samsung VR headset. And several other hotel groups have VR films of their properties that aren’t doing much, just lazily hanging around waiting to be Googled.

The North Face has taken VR to new places, like Nepal (The North Face)

3 See what you can do Travel marketing is often about aspiration, and Marriott’s VR Postcards aren’t the only promotion where the focus is on a memorable experience rather than promoting the brand. Thomas Cook produced some simple VR videos for YouTube’s VR zone, including a helicopter ride across New York. You could watch it in selected stores on an Oculus Rift , or using a Google Cardboard headset with your phone at home if you were on their mailing list. Monarch airlines produced a skiing game for pop-up shops last winter, that paired Oculus Rift headsets with the Nintendo Wii balance board (and ski poles to make sure players didn’t fall over). The North Face has an ongoing roster of VR experiences which toured stores in the US and London, and anyone can download them, especially if you’re one of the 75,000 subscribers to Outside magazine who got a free Cardboard. The travel industry is doing VR a huge favour by sending out hundreds of thousands of the flat-pack Cardboard headsets, which work with a wide range of smartphones.

Even in VR, that’s a shockingly OTT lobby (360backpacking.com)

4 The ultimate photoboast I’ll be the first to admit it. Those shared travel photos on Facebook aren’t just about spreading the love, they’re also about showing off what a great time you’re having and the amazing things you’ve seen and done. And VR isn’t that expensive to make — you can spend millions on making a (pretty boring) film with a Hollywood star like Etihad did, or you can grab a VR camera for around £500 and start shooting, then upload it to YouTube and Facebook (Facebook’s investment in Oculus suggests it’s pretty confident about the future of VR). Travel blogger Rish has done just that with 360backpacking.com, so far he’s shot music festivals, cycle rides, hotels and beaches.

This VR stunt is about to get real (The North Face)

5 Impossible experiences Many of us have travel and leisure ambitions we’ll just never realise, and many of the VR marketing pitches are about bringing us closer to our dreams so that we’ll pay for something we can achieve, or at the very least we’ll be equipped in Arctic-ready sportswear when we go to the pub in January. The North Face’s VR vids feature outdoorsy-athletes doing things most of us are happy for someone else to take on, although the company’s Korean arm took the VR experience one step further with a virtual husky ride that finished in a surprise twist as they were hooked up to an actual dog sled for a ride around the mall. Oculus owners can download a Grand Canyon kayak-ride simulator, although the use of entirely computer-generated graphics makes it less than convincing. It sits alongside a diving game that offers the fun of scuba without the technical challenge, and a climbing simulator that requires no exercise to improve your upper-body strength or grip. You can already go into space with NASA’s VR films, and the agency has plans for a Mars simulator which will have conspiracy theorists twitching, but you can also bet that VR is on the roadmap for the likes of Virgin Galactic, to make their space travel accessible beyond the millionaire set who can afford it.