Care Home Virtual Tours: What Families Want to See Before They Visit

Choosing a care home is one of the hardest decisions a family makes, and it increasingly begins on a screen. Adult children searching from another town, a hospital discharge team working to a deadline, a spouse who cannot easily travel: all of them shortlist online before they visit. A virtual tour lets them see the home properly before they pick up the phone. This article covers what the data says, what to show and how to do it with residents' dignity intact.

The enquiry data

TrustedCare reviewed more than 50,000 enquiries across 34 UK care operators in 2023. Digital channels generated 63.6% of them, led by the operator's own website (26.6%) and Google search (21.2%). carehome.co.uk reports that more than 80% of people looking for care say online reviews are extremely or very important. There are around 16,566 care homes in the UK housing roughly 441,000 residents, so families almost always have several to compare. The home that shows itself openly online is the one that makes the shortlist.

Google's own research points the same way. Complete Business Profiles make customers 2.7 times more likely to consider a business reputable and 70% more likely to visit, and a Street View tour is one of the things that completes a profile.

What families look for

Having produced tours for groups including Signature Senior Living, Enterprise Retirement Living and The Vale, the scenes that get the most attention are consistent:

• A bedroom, ideally a show room dressed as a resident would have it, with the en-suite. Families want to picture their relative living there.
• Communal lounges and dining rooms, because daily life happens there. Show a table laid, a quiet corner, the view from the window.
• Gardens and outdoor space, including how residents get to them. An aerial 360 from our drone shows the grounds and the setting in one scene.
• The extras: cinema room, hair salon, café, therapy or activity rooms. These are what differentiate one home from another.
• Arrival: the entrance, reception and the first impression a visitor gets.

Hotspots do the explaining: a short welcome from the home manager, the weekly activities programme as a PDF, a gallery from the last summer fete, the CQC rating, and a call-to-action to book a visit. On 360 Studio, the home's own team can update all of this when the programme or the manager changes.

Privacy and dignity

We photograph communal areas when they are quiet, use a show bedroom rather than an occupied one, and never include a resident without consent. Where someone is in shot with permission, faces can be blurred before the tour goes live. Our photographers are DBS checked and used to working around care routines, mealtimes and medication rounds. A single home is usually captured in one to two hours; care groups with several homes get a dedicated project manager who schedules the whole programme.

Bespoke tour or Google Street View?

Both, ideally, and from the same visit. A bespoke branded tour on your website, with hotspots and a booking call-to-action, does the persuading. A Google Street View tour on your Business Profile catches the family searching "care homes near me" on Google Maps. Prices for either start from £350 per home, with multi-site pricing for groups and no travel charges anywhere in mainland UK; see our pricing page.

Next step

Our care home virtual tours page has examples and answers to common questions. If you would like a price for one home or a whole group, send us the addresses and we will reply with a clear price.