The Boggy Creek Airboat Adventures team tapped into Starmark's virtual reality expertise to re-create the experience that Boggy Creek offers in a semi-scripted experience, sharing the breathtaking beauty of nature, including wetlands and wildlife, in an immersive VR experience.
Objective:
The goal was to use VR in a compelling and innovative way to share the spirit of adventure they provide their guests even before their guests arrive in the Everglades, the Boggy Creek team gained a new sense of confidence and a new way to grow their business.
Target Audience:
Tour operators and the travel trade are an important audience for Boggy Creek Airboat Adventures. They book entire buses of guests and recommend the park to hundreds of people traveling from all over the world. Most of these professionals have never been to the park, including many located in Europe, making it difficult to give them a familiarization tour.
To help them understand the full Boggy Creek experience — and share the excitement and adventure with prospective guests — Boggy Creek sought a virtual experience that would bring it all to life by putting them right in the middle of the action. And to honor their time, the brand had to deliver it all in just a few minutes.
Creative Strategy:
The aim was to capture the thrill of whisking across the water as a guest observes turtles, birds, and other wildlife in and around the sprawling walls of grass, encountering nature's predators — including the American Alligator — from the safety of Boggy Creek's U.S. Coast Guard-inspected airboats.
Beyond the main attraction, the team showcased the breadth and depth of experiences visitors could choose. These included a seminole native village, gem and fossil mining, a baby alligator pond, the onsite barbeque restaurant, tiki bar, large pavilions, and the latest addition to the park, the butterfly encounter.
Context:
Phase one of the VR attractions was strategically launched at the IPW trade show in Orlando, Florida, where 50 travel agents scheduled an appointment with Boggy Creek to learn more. Future phases will continue to bring more Boggy Creek experiences into the virtual world.
Overall Campaign Execution:
As a B2B campaign, this was deployed exclusively on the Meta Quest 2 virtual reality headset. The sales staff is using this to meet with travel professionals in the U.K. and Germany in VR to give them a personalized tour of the property and explain everything a guest can do while in the park.
Mobile Execution:
The real-time interactive sales demos far exceed anything that Boggy Creek has done in the past with video or Zoom meetings alone.
Due to massive travel restrictions around the world, giving "familiarization tours" (or Fam Tours) to travel agents and tour operators (those groups that typically book hundreds of guests per year) had become increasingly difficult. Zoom filled the need at first, but now Zoom fatigue has set in for the industry. Thus, the company needed a way to stand out. Immersive technology allows someone to tour the park at "actual size," and participate in the tour, not just watch.
The campaign was strategically launched at the IPW trade show in Orlando, Florida, where 50 travel agents scheduled an appointment with Boggy Creek to learn more. Those who did provided excellent feedback. The sales staff is now using this to meet with travel professionals in the U.K. and Germany in VR to give them a personalized tour of the property and explain everything a guest can do while in the park. These are currently ongoing.
