Expedia to offer virtual hotel tours on booking

Travel booking website Expedia may soon offer virtual reality as a way to help customers test out their hotel rooms before they book.

Expedia operates several travel booking brands including Hotels.com, Hotwire.com, Egencia, and Venere.com and has showcased a way for users to use virtual reality to walk into a hotel room and check out amenities and features, including a room's view and balcony, accord to a report in Fortune magazine.

In a sign of the times, Expedia may beat their competitors to using new age technology to attract millenial clients. 

"If you're going to make the decision of [booking] a cruise, wouldn't it be cool if you could check out the ship [virtually] before you spend that much money?" Expedia's senior vice president, product and design Arthur Chapin said during a demo at the Expedia office in Singapore, reports Mashable. 

The website goes on to add that in the demo users were able to interact with the room too, by sliding open doors and stepping out into the balcony.

However virtual reality isn't the only technology Expeida is experimenting with. The company invested more than $1 billion in its technology in 2016 is also looking at introducing voice into the booking experience, including smart voice-enabled devices such as Amazon's Echo.