TORONTO -- Before COVID-19 swept across the globe and forced international travel to a standstill, shuttering people inside their homes for months at a time and making the concept of interacting with strangers a frightening business, leading live tours was a booming industry.
In tourist hotspots worldwide, numerous companies competed to connect visitors with locals who ran in-person tours for small groups of people, promising experiences that couldn’t be achieved without the expertise of a person who lived there.
Then, the pandemic hit, and tour guides started taking their expertise online.
“In January and February we saw a slight dip in our bookings in Asia, but nothing too concerning,” Matthijs Keij, CEO of WithLocals, told CTVNews.ca in an email. “In March we almost came to a standstill with the outbreaks in Europe and the U.S. travel restrictions.”
Sean P. Finelli, co-founder of The Tour Guy, said that employees went from preparing for the upcoming big tourist months to seeing business vanish.
“Our jobs were to just refund customers and cancel their trips,” he told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview. “Every day our bookings got lower and lower and lower. And finally, for the first time in like seven years, we had, I think, a day or two with absolutely no bookings, which was crazy.
“We do hundreds of thousands of travellers per year. So we'd [normally] have a booking every couple of minutes, if not multiple in the same minute. And now we had full days with no bookings. We were like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to do something here.’”
The answer that many companies hit upon? Guided online tours.
“After the initial shock we realized we had to move, because COVID-19 itself is out of our control,” Keij said. “That's when we started to focus on online experiences.”
Anyone can hop onto Google Streetview and walk themselves through the streets of cities across the world if they want to. The difference between this and a guided virtual tour is the guide themselves.
“We needed to make it like it was live,” Finelli said. “This was someone in that city and that you could ask questions throughout.”
Both Keij and Finelli said the virtual tours of WithLocals and The Tour Guy were run largely by the very same guides who used to take people through the streets of their cities or through landmarks they live near.
“We are working with a lot of local tour guides. Some of them are professional guides, while others simply want to share their passion for their city,” Keij said. “It's heartbreaking to see how they have lost their income, while battling against the virus. For that reason it's even more heartwarming to see we can help some of them with online experiences.”
Since their online tours are cheaper than in-person tours were, at first The Tour Guy was only making enough money to pay the guides and office staff who handled administrative tasks, after they launched their “Interactive Virtual Tours” in March.
“Our focus on doing these wasn't just to make a product and keep ourselves relevant, which obviously that is of large importance to us,” Finelli said. “It was to give money to the guides and give money to people that either were not able to earn money during the time of the COVID lockdown.”
Some tours take advantage of the lack of tourists in their city in order to bring virtual ones along with them. One tour on WithLocals, advertising itself as “Venice Without the Crowds,” promises guests they will be walking through the city along with their guide, down “hidden alleyways.”
“Together with a GPS connection, you can decide which street to take next!” the description says.
Another guide offers to drive you through Berlin in his car, and takes requests on the route, while a third will show online visitors the sights of Amsterdam while biking through the city.
On WithLocals, these live-streamed “city discovery” tours can cost anywhere from $70 to $110 for groups of 10 to book a tour.
Keij said it’s the “human element” that makes these guided tours special.
“I can spend years on Google Streetview, but without a meaningful conversation and the personal touch from a local guide it's hard to really connect with another culture,” he explained. “Especially in this day and age, there are so many opposing viewpoints, that I hope we can contribute a little bit by simply enabling a conversation between people.”
Because tour guides are so used to their routes or specialty, they can bring that personal experience to the online tours. One guide who runs a tour of the Paris Catacombs through The Tour Guy is a “cataphile,” according to Finelli, which is a Parisian who sneaks down into the city’s catacombs at night and explores them, gaining knowledge the average citizen doesn’t have.
“The tour begins at “The Gates of Hell” (Barrière d’Enfer in French), where you will descend down the staircase underground into the great Catacombs,” the tour’s description promises.
The Tour Guy’s virtual tours, which all clock in around $23 or less, are largely presentations that the guides run online tourists through, sharing pictures, videos and stories about the regions they are showing off in the tour and answering questions.
They’re hosted through third-party online software from a company called BigMarker, so that online tourists don’t have to download applications onto their own computer, like Zoom, in order to take a tour. Guides can also add extra things to the tours, such as polls for guests to take.
“We want it to be really interactive and more immersive and fun for people,” Finelli said.
WithLocals and The Tour Guy are far from the only companies offering online tours. TakeWalks, another company specializing in walking tours, now has “Tours From Home” available on their website, while the booking platform GetYourGuide has videos of past “The World At Home” tours posted for free.
Across these platforms, extra experiences run by locals, from cooking classes to history lessons to dance lessons, are also available.
The tourism team at the Faroe Islands, a self-governing archipelago north of Scotland that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, came up with one of the more creative virtual experiences the pandemic has seen.
They strapped a camera to a local and allowed guests to log online and control the local’s journey through the dramatic landscape of the islands as if they were a video game character, complete with a video game controller on the bottom of the screen that allowed guests to request left, right, forward, etc.
Only 22 tours were run over the summer, so you can’t play this real-life version of Skyrim anymore, but videos of each tour are still available to watch on their Facebook.
Companies with more household names are also trying to get in on the guided virtual experiences business. Amazon launched Amazon Explore last month, while Airbnb is also offering online experiences, one of which lets you follow an actor dressed as a plague doctor through the streets of Prague, half history lesson and half city tour.
It’s a wealth of online windows into other worlds.
“If you asked me last October if I wanted to do virtual tours, I would say, no, I'm not really interested,” Finelli said. “COVID-19 obviously just literally put a cork in the flow of customers to walking tours, which is our main staple. It's kind of in our brand mantra. We want to go there, touch, feel and see and smell the areas that we're going to.”
But he said these tours have been a lifeline for many who were “just completely bored out of their minds” in lockdown.
In-person walking tours are now rebounding within Europe, but tourists from North America make up a huge segment of business, and so far, it’s looking to be a while before travel across the Atlantic Ocean returns to the same levels as before the pandemic.
While Finelli is looking forward to when in-person tours are able to come back fully, he doesn’t think they’ll see large scale demand until next summer.
Regardless, he thinks virtual tours will still be sticking around, even just as a planning tool for tourists who want to know which landmarks are worth putting into their official route for when they make the physical trip over.
