Virtual tour experts for 10 yrs.

247REP.com Virtual Tours for Hotels, Resorts, and Destination Marketing

A STUDY OF YOUR CUSTOMERS

DATA MEMO

BY: PIP Director Lee Rainie (202-419-4500)

RE: tours

54 million Americans have used the internet to take tours

Since the dawn of the Web in the early 1990s, internet advocates have argued that one of the Web’s most powerful applications would be to open up new worlds to people and help them easily experience faraway places.

A new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project finds that 45% of online American adults have taken advantage of this internet application and taken tours of another location online. That represents 54 million adults who have used the internet to venture somewhere else.

On a typical day, more than two million people are using the internet to take a virtual tour.

Some of the most popular tour destinations include museums, tourist and vacation locales, hotels and motels, colleges and prep schools, real estate, historical exhibits, parks and nature preserves, and public places such as the White House and the Taj Mahal.

This is a first-time measurement by the Project that came in its most recent tracking survey between November 23 and November 30. It is not possible for us to say how fast this activity online has been growing, but it is safe to say that the spread of broadband connections has made tours easier and encouraged those who create tours to create richer tour experiences through streamed tours. Some 60% of those who have broadband connections at home and 62% of those who have broadband connections at work have taken tours.

Unlike many other internet activities, tours are not the province of young internet users. Indeed, 52% of younger Baby Boomers (those age 40-49) have taken tours, compared to just 37% of those in Generation Y (ages 18-27).

Those who take tours are also highly educated: 58% of the internet users with college or graduate degrees have taken tours. In addition, tour takers are slightly more likely to be urban than rural (51% of urban internet users have taken tours vs. 42% of online rural residents).

247REP.com Virtual Tours

Breakdown of Consumers Using Virtual Tours
54 million online Americans have taken tours. The percentage of that 54 million who fall into each group…
Men	47%
Women	53%
Race/ethnicity
Whites	80%
Blacks	7%
Hispanics	9%
Other/Refused to answer	4%
Age
Generation Y (ages 18-27)	16%
Generation X (ages 28-39)	27%
Younger Baby Boomers (ages 40-49)	28%
Older Baby Boomers (ages 50-58)	21%
Matures (ages 59-68)	5%
After work (age 69+)	3%
Household income
Live in households earning less than $30,000	15%
$30,000-$49,999	22%
$50,000-$74,999	21%
$75,000 or more	42%
Educational attainment
Not high school graduate	4%
High School graduate	23%
Some college	27%
College and graduate school degree	46%
Community type
Rural	13%
Suburban	55%
Urban	32%
Internet access at home
Dial up	36%
Broadband	64%
Parental status
Parent with child under 18 living at home	44%
Non-parent	56%
Source: Pew Internet & American Life Project November 2004 survey. N=537 internet users. Margin of error is ±5%.

The nationwide phone survey cited here involved interviews with 914 adults, 534 of whom are internet users. The margin of error is plus or minus four percentage points.

The Pew Internet & American Life Project is a non-profit initiative of the Pew Research Center and is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts to examine the social impact of the internet. The Project does not advocate any policy outcomes. It is non-partisan.