Virtual tour heatmaps: discover what catches your visitors’ attention

They step into a holiday cottage. Turn towards the terrace. Zoom in on the coffee machine. Every visitor explores differently. For hospitality brands, those choices can reveal valuable clues about the details people want to inspect before booking.

At Poppr, we have developed our own heatmap technology for virtual tours, adding a visual layer to the way businesses understand exploration.

A video chooses the journey for its audience. A virtual tour lets visitors choose their own: which rooms to enter, which direction to turn and which details to bring closer.

Video analytics can measure plays and viewing time. Virtual tours add spatial context. You can distinguish interest in accommodation from interest in a swimming pool, then explore how visitors navigate within each scene.

That creates a practical opportunity: improve the information and experience around the questions your audience is trying to answer.

1. Understand which spaces people explore

With Google Analytics configured for the tour, scene visits and engagement help reveal which spaces attract visitors and how their journeys unfold. Compare accommodation, activities and facilities to identify where further investigation could be useful.

2. Understand what people interact with

Google Tag Manager helps configure the events sent to your analytics tools: information hotspots, menu selections and booking-button clicks. With the appropriate booking integration, these journeys can also be connected to completed bookings and booking value.

This helps teams investigate the relationship between exploration and conversion. It does not, on its own, prove that one detail caused a booking.

3. Understand exploration within a scene

Our custom heatmaps add a visual overview of viewing direction and time within a panorama. Combined with zoom behaviour and hotspot interactions, they help show which parts of a space visitors bring into view and inspect more closely.

These are interaction signals, not eye tracking. Their value lies in the patterns they help teams investigate.

The treehouse kitchen at Center Parcs Le Bois aux Daims makes the idea tangible. There is plenty to explore: the woodland view, the layout, the appliances and the space around the sink.

The accompanying illustration highlights the coffee machine. Imagine that a measured pattern showed visitors repeatedly zooming in on this appliance. A useful next step would be to add a hotspot explaining the machine and which capsules guests should bring.

A small detail could answer a practical question before arrival. The same approach could help clarify storage, room layouts or access to a terrace.

For hotels and holiday parks, the opportunity goes beyond an engaging visual. Use the insights to decide which amenities deserve clearer information, which scenes need better navigation and where booking prompts could be more helpful. Then measure whether those changes improve the visitor journey.

Across several properties, comparable reporting can help teams prioritise content updates and test improvements systematically.

This technology grew from the prototype work of our intern Jordan Bergmans and the development work of Arnout De Coninck, who rebuilt and developed the module further. A big thank-you to both for turning the idea into working technology.

Your virtual tour already invites people to explore. What could you learn from the way they do it?