Innovations, Lithuania, Technology, Tourism

With most travelling currently on-hold, meeting planners are facing difficulties planning events, even for the distant future, as site visits are now not that easy to organise. Lithuania's capital is offering a solution to this problem by opening up its venues for comprehensive online visits where anyone can take a walk, explore and measure spaces.

Go Vilnius, the city's development agency, is currently digitalising the city's most popular meeting and event venues, including hotels, universities, theatres, museums, and business centres suitable for association conferences and corporate meetings. The first digital versions are already available on the Go Vilnius website.

"The limitations caused by the global pandemic led us to create a tool that is crucial now, but will also remain extremely relevant long after the industry gets back to normal. At this point, 3D tours of the venues in Vilnius give organisers access to spaces that are temporarily inaccessible. This way they help venues generate better leads and increase bookings. However, once site visits get back to business-as-usual, the tool will bring more efficiency to the entire meeting planning process," says Inga Romanovskiene, Director of Go Vilnius. 

The virtual venue models are available to explore as 3D spaces where visitors can take a walk and inspect every detail of the venue, or they can get an overall view of the space in the form of a floor plan. The tool also allows users to take measurements of the spaces, a function that makes event planning much more efficient.

Gerhard Erasmus, the CEO of Apex Alliance Hotel Management, already sees the value in the digitalisation of Vilnius venues. 

"Such innovative tools that ensure a smooth user experience during sales strengthen the competitive advantage of our hotels in the international market and allow each customer to get acquainted with our spaces in detail by individually assessing the technical aspects relevant to them - layout, interior, technical solutions, etc. In the near future, the venue digitalisation process will gain even more momentum, so it is now very important to be one step ahead," says Gerhard Erasmus, the CEO of Apex Alliance Hotel Management. '

The new tool also reflects how tech savvy Vilnius is and how the city has used this to come up with creative solutions throughout the pandemic. The city has been quick to implement digital solutions, which reinforces its position as one of the fastest growing technology hubs in Europe.