The Winter Sale is the biggest sales period of the year for Virgin Holidays. The Sale starts on Boxing Day every year and runs into the New Year, with the promotion providing discounts on holidays for the coming year, particularly for those booking their summer getaway.

The resort that featured in our solution - Riviera Maya in Mexico - was a key destination in this year’s Sale. Our Virgin Holidays Virtual Holiday experience highlighted activities on offer in the region and virtual tours of hotels in Riviera Maya that were on offer during the Sale.

This in-store activation added a revolutionary new element to this year’s Sale and met a fundamental business challenge that Virgin Holidays had faced year after year.

We created Virgin Holidays Virtual Holidays an immersive virtual reality experience that transported customers into their holidays. Combining the latest 360-degree filming techniques and VR technology, we created an enterprise app only available on in-store handsets.

Using Google Cardboard headsets, footage showed stunning sights of Riviera Maya in Mexico, where customers could find themselves on an idyllic beach, swimming with dolphins, or looking around a beautiful hotel they could book with Virgin Holidays.

Customers could experience their first taste of virtual reality, turning an in-store wait into a fantastic new experience, whilst staff converted interest into sales.

The scale of this activation and the relevance to the problem at hand meant this was not a PR gimmick, but a powerful new tool for staff.

The results were phenomenal, with stores featuring this experience seeing year-on-year sales increase 60% more than those that did not.

Sales of holidays to Riviera Maya specifically increased by 84% year on year within stores that featured Virtual Holidays, compared to 54% in stores without it.

The activity delivered an incredible ROI of 46 to 1.