Case Study:
Boulder Creek Ranch
A guest ranch and event facility
Business Challenge
Jim
and Gail Hasty have always wanted to own their own park. At their first
home, they called their backyard “Hasty Park”. Then they built a custom
home and christened it “Club Hasty”. So it was no surprise that, after
they gave the reins of their real estate business over to their son,
they built a ranch to fulfill their dreams of one day owning a big park.
Naturally, they designed it to be a revenue generating venture that included two activity centers where events could be held, a children’s playground, a sports park, a “kid’s camp”, demonstration gardens, an equestrian boarding and riding facility and a 2½ acre lake serving as a centerpiece for the facility. The activity centers, which were built around the small lake, were primarily setup to hold weddings and parties.
After the ranch was built, the Hasty’s were confronted with the task of how to attract people to use their facility. They quickly found out that before potential customers would rent out the facility, they first wanted to see and tour the facility. To repeatedly give these tours took valuable time out of the Hasty’s busy schedule so, to help market their ranch, they setup a website with pictures of the facility. Their website, however, still didn’t reflect the vision of their facility that the Hasty’s wanted to share with people.
Solution
Originally from the real estate industry, the Hasty’s knew about the concept of a virtual tour and thought that it could help market their ranch so they employed Virtual Tours West to create a comprehensive tour of their entire facility.
Realizing that their ranch attracted a wide variety of people, it was decided to develop two different types of tours. One type was an “interactive” tour for people who want to go directly to the particular services that they are interested in and get the details.
The other type was an “automatic” tour for people who want to sit back and be shown the different parts of the facility with minimal interaction. This tour has five separate chapters including an Introduction and can be viewed on YouTube. Both types of tours are easily accessible from Boulder Creek Ranch’s main website.
“Cliff with Virtual Tours West had a lot of patience with me when he was creating the tour”, said Gail Hasty. “He spent many hours rearranging the tour at my request until it represented the vision that I had for the ranch. When I realized that the buildings Cliff had already taken pictures of were now freshly painted the following week, he photographed them again with the same attention he had given them the first time.”
Results
Prospective customers of Boulder Creek Ranch can now see a virtual tour of the Hasty’s facility and they can choose either a quick overview (the automatic) tour or a more comprehensive (interactive) tour. “After the tours went on-line, I now spend more time booking events and less time showing the facility and answering questions on the phone explaining how our facilities are laid out”, says Hasty. “Every two weeks, Virtual Tours West provides us with a summary of how many times each of the virtual tours have been watched on YouTube”, continues Hasty.
Some statistics for the automatic tour show that the Introduction chapter was being watched on average of 30 times a week, the Equestrian chapter was being watched on average of 20 times a week and, in the months prior to the busy wedding season, the Wedding chapter was being watched on average of 80 times a week.
“We experienced an increase in wedding bookings after the virtual tours were added because it is so easy now for people to actually see the facility” says Hasty.
Gail Hasty summarized, “Even though Jim and I love to show off our ranch facilities, we are so glad that now anybody can help themselves to a tour, any time of the day and at their convenience, by using our website. If you own a business and would like to improve its visibility to the public, then I highly recommend having Virtual Tours West develop a virtual tour for you.”
See the complete set of tours at:
www.backroadswest.com/BCR
More about Virtual Tours West
Virtual Tours West (VTW) was founded in 2010 by Cliff Bandringa. We combine the skills of photography, graphics, mapping, demographics, presentation development and a lot of computer software experience to create sensational virtual tours. VTW can develop virtual tours that will showcase all types of facilities, businesses and properties and produce them in a variety of mediums.
