Virtual Eggheads - Does virtual reality have a place in travel retailing?

Some products lend themselves to very highly targeted marketing opportunities. I’m thinking here of the sort of things that end up being advertised on small posters above men’s urinals in motorway service station toilets. Currently filling this particular marketing spot is a poster featuring three naked men, each holding a hat over his Cox and Kings. Well, two of them are holding the hat; the middle man’s hat appears to be levitating of its own accord, supported we can only imagine by his very own medically assisted, erm… hat stand.

This thought was running around my head as I was having my hair cut last week. The usual - a number three at the back and sides, and shorten the top to match. Simple haircuts need simple tools and so my barber comes simply equipped with a comb, a good pair of scissors, an electric trimmer and a hairdryer. The hairdryer by the way is not for drying, it’s for blowing any stray (mostly grey) hairs off my shoulders when he’s finished.

Notably missing from my barbers, from all barbers I think, are those hairdryers that look like one half of an enormous plastic Kinder eggshell. You know the ones I mean? I think they may still have them in hairdressers today but I associate them mostly with the 1960s; with black and white pictures of glamorous women sat together in long rows, each with an egg on her head and a magazine in her lap. Maybe there was briefly a time and place in history when they were commonplace in barbers as well (I’m thinking Liverpool circa 1978, at the height of the Kevin Keegan curly perm craze) but for the most part, the features and benefits of the Kinder Egg hair dryer have only been fully appreciated by the female half of the population; as alien to men as the art of urinal marketing is to women.

Which brings me (admittedly in a very ‘round the houses’ sort of way) to my point, which is this: Every time someone mentions ‘virtual reality headsets’ in the same sentence as ‘the future of travel’ – and people are doing this a lot lately – that old black and white picture springs back into my mind. Only now it’s a long row of people sat in a travel agency with shiny white oversized goggles strapped to their faces. They’re sat facing a blank wall, neck muscles sagging as they try to take in the full glory of the virtual 3D Taj Mahal being beamed in 4K Ultra HD onto their straining, watery, bloodshot eyes. And outside looking in through the window are small confused children holding tightly to their grandparents’ hands and asking what it was like to really travel to places – you know, ‘before the masks’.

Passionate travel experts create virtual realities every day. They tell stories and add flavour and they can do one essential thing that a VR headset can’t? They can put the customer into the picture.