Virtual Tour and Digital Photography

[maria-g]

Hi Everyone,

We are Alastair and Maria Griffard and we own and run our virtual tour company VR360 Virtual Tours based in Scotland. Most of our work has been in the U.K and Florida, but we are now expanding and can provide our services in Europe.

We are the only virtual tour company that provides a selection of excellent brochures that gives our customers the advantage of showcasing their holiday homes on the internet. We will provide you with a branded and unbranded tour should you wish to add the tour to any rental websites.

We know how competitive the holiday rental market is these days, so to help our customers we also provide slide shows and a photo gallery which is handy for sending out to your guests by e-mail or can be sent out on CD.

We pride ourselves on our quality and after sales service and are available to our customers should they need any help.

We have set a fixed price for holiday homes using one of our brochures;

Up to 4 bedrooms €290 £195
5 bedrooms €335 £225
6 bedrooms €370 £250
7 and more €410 £275

All inclusive;

• Full Virtual Tour of your home including front and back of the property
• We provide the virtual tour branded – to include your website name or property name, your logo and slogan.
un-branded – some rental websites will only use an unbranded virtual tour.
• High quality digital photograph of each room including the front and back of the property.
• We provide a Slide show/Photo gallery.
• We design the brochure and change the colour to match your website.
• We host the 360° Virtual Tour for one year FREE, so you can easily add the link to your web site or any email you send to potential customers.
• Free support if you choose to add the virtual tour to your website yourself.
• Copy of the virtual tours and slide show will be sent to you on CD-ROM for you to use on your website and can be easily copied and sent to your potential customers.
• Along with the virtual tour and slide shows, you will also get copies of high resolution photographs for printing and low file size for use on the web.

To see our latest projects, click here

To read what our customers say about our service, click here

If you want to know more about our services or book your virtual tour please do not hesitate to contact us on 01750 725844 (UK), or +44 1750 725844 (from outside UK).

You can also contact us by e-mail at alastair@vr360virtualtours.com

To find out more about VR360 Virtual Tours or check the quality of our work, you can visit our website www.vr360virtualtours.com.

Kind Regards

Alasatair and Maria Griffard

[paolo]

Do you own a rental property?

[Normandy Cow]

Hello Alastair and Maria,
I have thought about adding a virtual tour to my website but always thought the cost would be prohibitively expensive. Can you please confirm - the prices above, what exactly do they include? Presumably they don't include expenses incurred in travelling to the property? And after the one year's free hosting, what is the annual fee?

Thanks!

[maria-g]

Do you own a rental property?

Hi Paolo, just to follow up our pm. Yes we have a property for rent here in Scottish Borders, Scotland, called Windermere. It is a 4 bed/2 bath near historic places Melrose and Jedburgh Abbeys and old Castles. It is also good for Salmon fishing because of the river tweed. We also just sold our 3 bed villa in Florida because want to upgrade later on, just waiting to see what happen to the property market first.

Looking forward to meet rental owners from the same area.

Maria

[maria-g]

Hello Alastair and Maria,
I have thought about adding a virtual tour to my website but always thought the cost would be prohibitively expensive. Can you please confirm - the prices above, what exactly do they include? Presumably they don't include expenses incurred in travelling to the property? And after the one year's free hosting, what is the annual fee?

Thanks!

Hi Catherine,

Thank you very much for your interest. The prices stated above and what's included are correct. We would like to be as competetive but at the same time to make sure that we are providing a good service.

To avoid more expense to our customers, we tend to schedule the work only if we know we have enough customers, for obvious reason that we have to cover the cost of travel.

For Florida where we have a customer base already, we schedule the work 3 times a year and if owner contact us to book the virtual tour we give them the option of dates and they can pick which date will suit them. Just in case someone wants to know, our next trip to Florida is next month November.

We can probably do the same in Europe, but only in popular destination places. Let us know your location and we will let you know when is the schedule date for the area is.

With regard to the hosting, it is FREE for 1 year and after that the fee is £50 or $70 per year or if you have your own personal website we can provide support to integrate the vtour to your website.

Any other query please do not hesitate to post it or contact me.

Thanks again.

Maria

[Mountain Goat]

I've been interested in Virtual Tours for a while, and particularly interested in Alastair/Maria's outfit, as it seems good value

My plan was to get half a dozen owners together and share the cost (i.e. within a couple of hours of Geneva) of travel expenses, accommodation etc.

I've been going thoroughly through the demo sites, looking for the Java versions (and not anything which needs a download i.e. Quicktime), but the problem has been, with all the ones I have tried, that the demos freeze, crash my laptop/desktop and sometimes lose the site altogether before bookmarking.

I use IE6 and Firefox as browsers, and run PCs with XPPro as o/s. Effects have been noticed on 3 desktops and 2 laptops.

I'm hoping that this outfit can produce working demos which don't run the risk of losing or confusing a customer.

Anyone out there using this sort of system?

MGoat

[Normandy Cow]

Maria,

Yes I would definitely be interested. We are in Normandy, just north of Rouen and 2 hours from Calais, so presumably if you are going to do a "tour" in France then we would be en route to wherever you would be going.

However, the logistics of the whole thing do seem a little problematic - i.e. we would prefer to be there ourselves while you do it so that I can ensure that the house is looking its best (and it would not be fair to impose such an exercise when there are guests already installed), so I guess that narrows it down to the off-season (which in our case is very short) or to when we are there ourselves during the school holidays. Then, what happens if it is bucketing down with rain on the day? (a fairly frequent occurrence in Normandy!). Finally, France is a BIG country, and the distances between "venues" will be very long (as we discovered while we were house-hunting) so you will not be able to do many in one day! So I can't see how it would be economically viable for you...

The only other thing I could offer is for you to have a free holiday at our place and then you could "film" it at your leisure while you are there!

[Fraise]

I'd be interested too but we are about an hour north of Bordeaux and would also want to be around to make sure it is looking it's best- I suppose big lead times could be the answer, these aren't without problems either obviously

www.thepetitmanoir.com

[alec]

Not wishing to put a downer on a fellow Scot, but I think that this can be relatively easily accomplished with a modern day digital camera and some photographic experience.
The big thing is trial and error and the good amateur to that of a professional

[Fraise]

Good to hear from you again Alec,it's great to have differing perspectives,thankyou

www.thepetitmanoir.com

[Normandy Cow]

Not wishing to put a downer on a fellow Scot, but I think that this can be relatively easily accomplished with a modern day digital camera and some photographic experience.
The big thing is trial and error and the good amateur to that of a professional

Well I have a good digital camera and consider myself to be a "good amateur" - so how would I go about doing this myself? Some pointers please!

[maria-g]

I've been interested in Virtual Tours for a while, and particularly interested in Alastair/Maria's outfit, as it seems good value

My plan was to get half a dozen owners together and share the cost (i.e. within a couple of hours of Geneva) of travel expenses, accommodation etc.

I've been going thoroughly through the demo sites, looking for the Java versions (and not anything which needs a download i.e. Quicktime), but the problem has been, with all the ones I have tried, that the demos freeze, crash my laptop/desktop and sometimes lose the site altogether before bookmarking.

I use IE6 and Firefox as browsers, and run PCs with XPPro as o/s. Effects have been noticed on 3 desktops and 2 laptops.

I'm hoping that this outfit can produce working demos which don't run the risk of losing or confusing a customer.

Anyone out there using this sort of system?

MGoat

Hi MGoat, we use iPIX software which utilises Java and we have not experienced any problems with people accessing the virtual tour and no instances were the virtual tours have locked up or crashed resulting in exiting the website.

I don't think that the problem is on the browsers, it is probably a virtual tour software that other company use, e.g. some virtual tour play only on .exe file and some browsers view this as a potential virus.

We have incorporated our virtual tour into a html web page to make it simple and for easy access on the net. We find that this is a reliable method and we have had no negative feedback from our customers.

Any other query please do not hesiate to post or contact us.

[maria-g]

To make it viable for us to carry out virtual tours outwith the popular destination places i.e. Florida, the Algarve, the costas in Spain, etc. We would need to have at least 6 properties for virtual tours within 2 hours drive, this would make it viable at the prices quoted above. Probably the best way is if you know any other owners in your area who would like a virtual tour done then we can organise a time to suit everyone for us to come out.

For less than 6 houses prices will be done on a job by job basis.

Remember if you book your virtual tours with us you also get high quality proffesional photographs FREE. Also you have the choice of photographs being presented as a Photo Gallery or Slide show. You can view sample by going to our latest project page:

http://www.vr360virtualtours.com/newclients.php

[maria-g]

Not wishing to put a downer on a fellow Scot, but I think that this can be relatively easily accomplished with a modern day digital camera and some photographic experience.
The big thing is trial and error and the good amateur to that of a professional

Hi Alec, whereabout are you in Scotland? We are in Selkirk just south of Edinburgh. Good to know there's another scot in this forum.

[Eileen2]

Hi Maria-g,

I'm not far from you. I'm at Carfraemill.

If you are ever going to Corfu then I'd be interested in your services.

Eileen.