Virtual Visit Tours

The scenery is spectacular here and if you are planning your visit to Northern Ireland one way you can uncover the beauty of this place is by taking a virtual tour of different locations.

For over 10 years now Thomas McVea has been taking visitors beyond the still image and sets you inside of the scene with his superb  high quality 360° photography.

The work Thomas does was born out of friends and family coming back from holiday and showing him their holiday pictures. On many occasions, as they were explaining the scene, they’d point to areas outside of the photograph saying things like “to the left, up the beach, was this cool beach bar” and “behind us was a beautiful ocean view”.

Thomas wanted to jump in to that picture and take control of it. He wanted to see that bar up the beach, he wanted to turn around and look behind me to see the wonderful view of the ocean.

With these desires in mind he started his journey of wanting to go beyond the still photograph, wanting to give people the ability to jump into the photograph and immerse themselves in the scene.

So, being inspired by what could be achieved, Thomas set up Virtual Visit Tours and for 10 years now he has continually grown his business from a personal project to what it is today with over 250,000 visitors to his site per year.

Thomas has photographed 1000’s of interactive panoramic pictures (virtual tours) from 100’s of destinations and tourism businesses across Ireland, North and South. It’s become one of the largest 360VR Hub for tourism content.

Through the medium of high quality 360° photography, his journeys has taken him to some amazing places and he is delighted he can bring people with him and let them ‘virtually’ stand in his shoes. Thomas’s  360° photography enables visitors to take a step into a virtual prelude to the real-world experience that awaits them.

And it’s not just about the scenery. When you visit Virtual Visit Tours you will see that Thomas also assists travelers by providing an insight into local accommodation, locals bars and restaurants and more. And with quarter of a million visits to his site this is a fantastic link up between visitors and providers.

With a Virtual Visit (360°) tour, it’s not just about great 360VR photography. It’s also about getting it seen.

Virtual Visit Tours Factfile:

• virtualvisittours.com is where customer’s 360VR content is married with a tourism and destination focused online platform and one which reaches 250k visitors per year.
• Tourism businesses receive a featured profile on this website.
• There is also a huge opportunity to use 360VR content to boost traffic to your own platforms. Did you know that each year, over one million additional views of Virtual Visit Tours’ customer’s 360° content is tracked across a growing content distribution network.
• As a Google Trusted business Virtual Visit Tours can publish your professionally captured 360° photos to your business listing on Google Maps. To date, the 360° content published for Virtual Visit Tours customers has reached 9,000,000 views.
• And what’s not to love about getting engaging content for your social media platforms to showcase to your audience what you have to offer. Visit Tours reach 52,000 people per month through social engagements.

Live It Experience It’ is a group of tourism businesses working together to promote our region through water, air and land based activities, food and drink and great places to stay. If you would like to become a member business in our ‘Live It Experience It’ cluster please submit your information through our online form –  Sign Up Here. Pitch your business and meet like minded tourism businesses who you could cluster with. #liveitexperienceit