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鈥檛 be achieved without the expertise of a person who lived there.
Then, the pandemic hit, and tour guides started taking their expertise online.
鈥淚n January and February we saw a slight dip in our bookings in Asia, but nothing too concerning,鈥� Matthijs Keij, CEO of WithLocals, told CTVNews.ca in an email. 鈥淚n March we almost came to a standstill with the outbreaks in Europe and the U.S. travel restrictions.鈥�
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.
鈥淥ur jobs were to just refund customers and cancel their trips,鈥� he told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview. 鈥淓very 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.
鈥淲e 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, 鈥極h, we鈥檝e got to do something here.鈥欌��
The answer that many companies hit upon? Guided online tours.
鈥淎fter the initial shock we realized we had to move, because COVID-19 itself is out of our control,鈥� Keij said. 鈥淭hat's when we started to focus on online experiences.鈥�
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.
鈥淲e needed to make it like it was live,鈥� Finelli said. 鈥淭his was someone in that city and that you could ask questions throughout.鈥�
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.
鈥淲e 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,鈥� Keij said. 鈥淚t'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.鈥�
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 in March.
鈥淥ur focus on doing these wasn't just to make a product and keep ourselves relevant, which obviously that is of large importance to us,鈥� Finelli said. 鈥淚t 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.鈥�
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 鈥淰enice Without the Crowds,鈥� promises guests they will be walking through the city along with their guide, down 鈥渉idden alleyways.鈥�
鈥淭ogether with a GPS connection, you can decide which street to take next!鈥�
Another guide offers to in his car, and takes requests on the route, while a third will show online visitors the sights of Amsterdam
On WithLocals, these live-streamed 鈥渃ity discovery鈥� tours can cost anywhere from $70 to $110 for groups of 10 to book a tour.
Keij said it鈥檚 the 鈥渉uman element鈥� that makes these guided tours special.
鈥淚 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,鈥� he explained. 鈥淓specially 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.鈥�
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 鈥渃ataphile,鈥� according to Finelli, which is a Parisian who sneaks down into the city鈥檚 catacombs at night and explores them, gaining knowledge the average citizen doesn鈥檛 have.
鈥淭he tour begins at 鈥淭he Gates of Hell鈥� (Barrière d鈥橢nfer in French), where you will descend down the staircase underground into the great Catacombs,鈥� the
The Tour Guy鈥檚 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鈥檙e hosted through third-party online software from a company called BigMarker, so that online tourists don鈥檛 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.
鈥淲e want it to be really interactive and more immersive and fun for people,鈥� 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 available on their website, while the booking platform GetYourGuide has videos of past 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 the pandemic has seen.
They strapped a camera to a local and allowed guests to log online and control the local鈥檚 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鈥檛 play this real-life version of Skyrim anymore, but videos of each tour are still available to
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 through the streets of Prague, half history lesson and half city tour.
It鈥檚 a wealth of online windows into other worlds.
鈥淚f you asked me last October if I wanted to do virtual tours, I would say, no, I'm not really interested,鈥� Finelli said. 鈥淐OVID-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.鈥�
But he said these tours have been a lifeline for many who were 鈥渏ust completely bored out of their minds鈥� 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鈥檚 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鈥檛 think they鈥檒l 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.
