By Bernard Frischer, Founder and President
Virtual tourism can be traced back twenty or thirty years, but it has only really taken off with the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic. This isn’t surprising. Virtual tourism offers professionals in real estate, hospitality, and cultural tourism a fast, economic, and effective way to convey detailed spatial information about a place of interest like a house, hotel room, or historic monument to people all over the world. Covid-19 speeded up the adoption of space-bridging technologies like telemedicine and telecommuting. It also made people more open to the idea of exploring cultural heritage sites virtually on their smartphones, tablets, PCs, and VR headsets.
Flyover Zone is a leader in the application of virtual tourism to cultural tourism. Cultural tourism–trips people take to see museums, monuments, historic sites–accounts for half of all international travel, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization. Thus, it is one of the most important sectors of the world economy.
Flyover Zone virtualizes and democratizes the experience of cultural tourism, making it more accessible to people who cannot take real-world trips whether for personal, physical, economic, or other reasons. For those who are fortunate enough to be able to travel, Flyover Zone’s virtual tours help to prepare for a trip, to get the most out of it while on site, and to deepen knowledge and memory after returning home.
Our tours make it possible to virtually visit cultural heritage sites around the world about which you may never have heard, to see them from the comfort of your home or classroom, and to learn about them from the world’s leading experts. If you are a travel buff, use our virtual tours to find new destinations to add to your bucket list. If you are a teacher, use them to enrich your curriculum and to engage your students in the history, art, and culture of the past by taking them on a virtual field trip.
Flyover Zone’s proprietary streaming app YorescapeTM allows you to take a virtual tour whenever you want, to listen to experts explaining what you see at each stop along the way, and to go back to revisit the site as often as you like. Yorescape’s Group Tour feature also makes it easy to take the same tour on a specific date and time in the company of family, friends, or students. Finally, Yorescape’s Free Roam feature allows you to move around the site wherever your curiosity leads you.
All in all, you see why we like to say that Yorescape is an early example of Virtual Tourism 2.0. This is based on the simple but powerful idea of empowering virtual tourists to visit a site whenever they want, as many times as they wish, and in the company of others. And did we mention that Yorescape features Time Warps that take you to the site not only as it looks today but also in its heyday, hundreds or thousands of years ago?
