A Metaverse customer experience

Welcome to my Metaverse day! Today I will take you to a journey when I vision how Metaverse will be affecting our tourism and customer experience in the future. In some cases this future is already here but not that many businesses are thinking about how they will be using the Metaverse this way. Yet.

Planning my physical world trip

Let’s start my day as a person who wants to book a trip to the hotel or resort. Typically (today) we go to the hotel website and mostly only get pictures about generic – or best decorated – hotel rooms, lobby, reception and so on. From all those pictures you can not create a big picture what the place is like. You don’t see anything about corridors, accessibility (if you can move around easily with a wheelchair or is there a lots of stairs if you have a bad knee for example) or do you like the overall feel or not. And what about the view from the room window? The answer to this would be the Digital Twin of the hotel and all rooms. It would contain at minimum a Lidar + camera scanned hotel interior and in resorts also everything connected to the hotel: pools, spa and exterior areas.

Photo by Asad Photo Maldives on Pexels.com

I use my tablet browser to navigate to the hotel site, and from there I choose their Metaverse experience. This allows me to explore the hotel fully and look around how the lobby looks like, do I like the bar, check on accessibility (since I know a couple relatives with these needs is going to book their trip as well) and of course I want to check out rooms. Using the menu I jump to the floor map with highlighted rooms to my search criteria (room type, price and so on) and enter the first room. As I can freely look around the room I know things I like or not – this doesn’t have a King size bed so I refine my search and jump to the next room. Checking it out I can view the room again – the bed looks good, interior is fine, bathroom has a spacious shower and finally the view from the window is nice as well. Inside the room I can then book this specific room to my stay. After booking the room I can see hotspots becoming active on tables and bed, allowing me to choose options that I want to add to my stay experience. Since I’ll be there on quality time with my wife, yes I definitely want us to have champange in ice waiting for us along with a few roses when we arrive. I also select us tickets to the nearby theater for the show running during our stay. Confirming these first, this room converts to my reservation center, so I can manage the stay also from here.

Adding even more extras

Since there is also a spa next to the hotel, I jump to it’s Metaverse experience and see it has been created as immersive version. Grabbing my VR/AR Headset and wearing the I get to see the spa as realisticly as possible (empty of guests, of course). As I check it around I want to accompany that to my hotel stay and add us tickets there, connected to our hotel reservation (going through the same billing). Looking around the spa I book us a private sauna and jacuzzi, with some refreshments (and option to order more when it there, of course).

Being happy with the spa, theater and the room I confirm selections. In the confirmation I can see I can view my stay experience if I want to share the hype with my wife in advance- but perhaps it works out better as a nice surprise.

Would this scenario already be possible?

Today it is already possible to lidar-scan interiors and exteriors, and connect that Digital Twin to the customer path experience. Scanning isn’t something new – it has been here for some years and real estates are already using that to highlight apartments and houses. It is also easy to add more information to these models via hotspots, and adding customer path & purchase experience is just a matter of developing it. With this example I wanted to highlight how Metaverse tech and Web3 could be already used to improve our experience from the planning phase. And for businsses it would mean customers would be more easily adding extras to the room reservations. I could see this used first on those hotels and resorts that want to offer quality to customers and stand out on the market- realizing that this would make them stand out better and people would be more happy about their experience. How many times we have seen those “rooms with a view” having the view of the backstreet alley from their window?

As example in my recent hotel visit I scanned the room and added a few hotspots there to show more information.

3D tour in video version. In reality you can roam around the room freely and click on hotspots.

Hows the 3D representation compared to the way we see today?

The Future looks good

No, you can not do everything easily today that I visioned in my Metaverse day experience earlier in this article. Or you could, but it would require quite a lot of work today. Tomorrow (=soon) it will be much easier, but if you wait until tomorrow without doing anything you are already late when it becomes a reasonable option. Thinking technical stuff like integrations and the whole customer path experience is important – but if you don’t have a roadmap or vision where you want to be you never start. Remember that tech is easy after all – it will come and if you are ready and do the groundwork properly – the next step in the Metaverse Day is easier than you think today.