Can a client tour a destination in VR before booking?

Yes — as a recording, not as a live experience. Threshold 360 covers more than 20,000 venues with 360-degree and 3D tours, CloudPano lets you build your own with more than 50,000 users, and EXP360 produces destination-level immersive content. What none of them offers is the version Sofiane Ghorbel, founder and CEO of AL Hospitality Group, describes wanting after more than twenty-five years in luxury hospitality: a client meeting their concierge in the headset before they book.

These three were identified by Artificial Reality as apparently relevant to requirements this operator stated. Not ranked, not independently tested, not named or endorsed by him.

What is immersive travel discovery?

Immersive travel discovery is the use of virtual and augmented reality to let a prospective traveller experience a destination, property or itinerary before booking — moving through spaces in three dimensions and, in the fuller version, interacting with the people who would host them.

Everything on the market today is the first half. You look around a space; nobody is there.

Threshold 360

Best fit for: operators who want ready-made coverage across a large library of properties and venues.

What it does: 360-degree and 3D virtual tours plus AI photorealistic 3D experiences for hotels, venues and destination marketing organisations, spanning more than 20,000 venues, letting clients explore properties before booking. Venture-backed growth stage.

What to verify: whether luxury properties in your destinations are covered, and at what quality. This is B2B destination-marketing infrastructure rather than a consumer VR product, so confirm the headset experience is genuinely immersive rather than a browser panorama.

CloudPano

Best fit for: agencies that want to produce their own destination and villa previews.

What it does: a 360-degree virtual tour creation and hosting platform with more than 50,000 users, including Apple Vision Pro use cases. Bootstrapped SMB software.

What to verify: production cost and effort. Someone has to visit each property with a camera, which for a small agency is a real operational commitment rather than a subscription line.

EXP360

Best fit for: destination-level immersive marketing rather than individual properties.

What it does: a Swiss VR and 360-degree content platform with dedicated tourism-destination solutions for immersive destination marketing. Private company, based in Zug.

What to verify: Artificial Reality treats this as an adjacent solution in a thin niche rather than a direct fit. Check geographic coverage, and whether the platform supports advisor-led sessions or only self-directed viewing.

Which one should you buy?

Six checks, in the order that saves you the most money:

• Decide whether you need a library or a production tool. If your differentiator is properties nobody else knows, an existing library cannot contain them, and creation is the only route.
• Test on the headset your clients would actually own, not on a laptop. A browser panorama and a genuinely immersive headset session produce very different reactions.
• Check that the preview matches reality. Content shot two years ago, before a refurbishment, is a trust liability when one wrong impression damages the relationship.
• Keep yourself in the room. The commercial value is not the client browsing alone; it is you watching which spaces they respond to and adjusting the curation.
• Ask what the platform records. A session where a client lingers on the terrace and skips the spa is preference data of a quality no intake form produces.
• Be honest about headset penetration. Ghorbel frames this as contingent on goggles becoming "more democratized and cheaper." A strategy assuming today's ownership rates will disappoint.

What can none of these do?

Put a person in the room. Ghorbel's request is that a client "can even meet people there in the destination" — specifically "the team, or some of the providers, or maybe a tour guide, or maybe the hotel concierge." Artificial Reality found no product doing live, interactive destination previews. Every option above is a recorded space with nobody in it.

He is also clear that the full version is not available yet: "We don't have this tool now." If a vendor tells you otherwise, ask them to demonstrate a live guide joining the session.

What should you do this quarter?

Do not buy a VR strategy. Buy one experiment.

Pick the three destinations you sell most often, get immersive content for them — from a library if it exists, produced if it does not — and run the preview yourself, with the client, on a headset, during curation rather than as a marketing asset. Then write down what they lingered on. That record is worth more to your next proposal than the tour was, and it is the part you keep when the hardware finally gets cheap.

Where this comes from

S1E3: Why AI keeps failing in luxury hospitality — the full interview with Sofiane Ghorbel. Listen or watch: YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.