Until now, virtual tours were available only through virtual tour companies and required special camera lenses and software. This excluded the independent photographer from this hot, expanding, and lucrative market. Not any more. Virtual Map Tours opens up a wide variety of business opportunities for the independent photographer, providing you with all of the software tools you need to create the best virtual tours available.

Virtual tours have traditionally focused on the real estate market. The additional functionality of Virtual Map Tours, and Virtual Map Tours’ unparalleled viewing technology opens up new, overlooked markets in tourism, recreation, travel and academia. These will no doubt become more hotly contested in the future, but are currently wide open.

Potential Virtual Map Tours clients include Resorts and Hotels, Golf Courses, Universities, Communities and Cities, Theme Parks, Zoos, Ski Resorts, Land Developers, Time-Shares, Parks and Recreation Departments, Restaurants, etc. The broad range of Virtual Map Tours capabilities allows you to tailor the tour to the market and the client, providing them exactly what they need.

Virtual Map Tours allows you complete independence. You create your own business and manage it yourself. No franchise fees. No tour quotas. No territorial restrictions. You set your own prices. You decide what markets you want to service. You own the customer. We supply you with the tools to create the very best virtual tours available on the market. The rest is up to you.

Interested? Register today for a standard free account and explore the many features and capabilities of Virtual Map Tours.

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One of the most-asked questions is “how long does it take to build a tour?” This depends on the complexity of the tour and how familiar you become with Virtual Map Tours. The Golf Course tour took approximately 16 hours from start to finish. The actual shoot time was about 3 hours with an hour travel each way (5 hours total). For this tour, 183 photos were taken, most of which were turned into panoramas. The photo-upload, map scanning, panorama building, and waypoint construction took about 8 hours. Assembling everything into the tour took about an hour. The audio recording, upload, and assignment to the tour took about 2 hours.

As a comparison, the University and San Diego Zoo tours took much less time with the total time on each between 8 and 10 hours (including the shoot).

There is a lot to learn to become proficient, so at first things may be slow, but once you’ve done a tour or two, you’ll find that the process moves right along.

Premium, Professional, and Commercial memberships are available which provide more storage, a greater number of active tours, larger tour size, and more tour downloads. You have options when it comes to your virtual business. If you want to merely create the Virtual Map Tours for your customers, you can have them sign up for the membership that will fit their needs. The Professional membership allows 1000 tour views each month, has a maximum tour size of 20MB (larger than any of our sample tours) and a maximum number of 100 active tours at any point in time. The cost for this is $79.95 per month. (As a comparison, many golf courses charge between $150 and $200 to play one round of golf, so this is an incidental cost for them). For clients that require more tour views each month (very high volume clients), there are custom Commercial memberships, which are available based on the exact needs of your client.

The other option is for you to get your own Professional or Commercial membership, and supply them a tour from your own account. You can then charge whatever you want to your clients for their monthly tour fee. This allows you another recurring revenue stream. How you handle this is up to you.

The bottom line is that your clients will pay for their monthly hosting charges. We encourage you to try the basic membership first, get familiar with it, and then upgrade if and when needed.

Virtual Map Tours allows complete flexibility for tour maintenance. Tours can be created and maintained by you, or passed on to your clients for updating and maintenance. Since there are no special skills required, anyone can maintain the tours.

Tours are easily edited in real time. Most edits are measured in minutes and are live when completed. There is no need for webmasters to maintain virtual tour marketing content. If you client already has some panoramas they want to re-use, this is no problem. Virtual Map Tours accepts existing photos, panoramas and 360-degree views.

Virtual Map Tours are built from an asset library that allows complete tour-building and editing flexibility. Tours can expand and grow over time. Individual tours can be linked together. Tours can continually be expanded and edited so the content is always current. Tour building blocks can be shared between tours for efficiency.

• Look and feel of the tours can be customized to fit seamlessly with existing website look and feel.
• Customized tour templates and branding available.

For additional marketing materials or any other Business Opportunity question, please contact us via our Contact Page and select “Business Development” from the dropdown list.