Turning a Complex Historic Layout into a Sales and Training Advantage with TrueTour
Set on 20 acres in South San Jose, Hayes Mansion San Jose, Curio Collection by Hilton is a Mediterranean Revival-style estate listed on the National Register of Historic Places and recognized by Historic Hotels of America. The property spans three historic buildings connected across different levels, with 214 guest rooms and more than 33,000 square feet of meeting space across 24 private rooms and outdoor areas, anchored by a 6,600-square-foot ballroom.
Business at the property runs around 40% group business, split fairly evenly across corporate, association, and SMERF segments including weddings, sports groups, and religious and educational organizations, with the remainder made up of transient corporate and leisure travelers. As a Curio Collection by Hilton property, Hayes Mansion draws heavily on Hilton’s booking channels alongside its own vanity site for discoverability.
Audrey Hahn, Director of Sales and Marketing, has led the property for nearly three years and previously used Visiting Media at four or five other Hilton properties during her career. When she arrived at Hayes Mansion, she inherited a property that was hard for both prospects and her own team to picture: three connected historic buildings with a layout that didn’t follow any simple logic. She made it her mission to fix that.
Situation
Hayes Mansion’s historic charm comes with a navigational challenge: three connected buildings, each with different levels, where rooms that appear to be on the same floor can require guests to go down a level and back up again to reach. For a sales and events team trying to walk planners through the space, or help them picture a room block or a wedding layout, that complexity was a constant obstacle.
It can be confusing. You can’t just go from one space to the other even though they are on the same floor. Sometimes you have to go down and then go up again. That’s why we need tours, because it’s so hard to walk people through space.
When Audrey joined the property in 2022, Visiting Media was already in place, but only covered the property’s main ballroom, leaving the rest of the historic estate undocumented. She became an advocate for expanding coverage to every meeting space and guest room on the property, knowing the value that the tool would bring for the different teams.
Process
Building Out Full Property Coverage and Self-Guided History Tour
She worked closely with the Visiting Media team to link the expanded tour together in a way that reflected how the property actually connects, given its unconventional layout. The project also introduced a new element: self-guided history tours, using in-tour hotspots to surface historical images and background on the mansion’s architecture and artwork for guests exploring on-site or remotely.
We took it one step further and we are not only using the TrueTours for virtual tours, proposals, and such, but this year we added an additional element which is the self-guided history tours. Your team helped us put hotspots at certain locations with historical images and the history of the space, because many of our meeting spaces have a historic element and background story around them, not only the meeting space but artwork and such. So as guests look around the hotel, they can click and review that information online, whether they are on-site or somewhere else.
A Tool for Training Sales and Events Team
With a combined sales and events team of 12, Audrey made the virtual tour a mandatory part of onboarding. New team members review the tour page by page, room to room, to learn the property’s layout before they ever walk a client through it in person.
It’s part of their training, onboarding, to make sure they look at the virtual tour page by page, room to room, to understand how to use it, number one, and then how to walk the clients through the space, how to sell the space.
The team also uses the tour throughout proposals and Cvent outreach, and Audrey plans to standardize including tour links in email signatures across the department.
Results
Simplifying a Historic, Multi-Building Layout
The tour gives both the sales team and prospective clients a way to understand a layout that’s difficult to describe in words alone, helping planners get accurate answers about room dimensions and logistics (down to whether a couch can fit through a historic doorway) without needing to be on-site.
Supporting International and Out-of-State Clients
Hayes Mansion regularly works with clients from out of state and internationally who can’t visit in person. Audrey described the tour as an essential part of how her team does business with this segment, noting she can’t imagine doing the job without it.
I can’t imagine doing it without it. It’s definitely an integral part of what we do.
New Visibility into Client Engagement
Before the platform’s analytics were available, Audrey had no way to measure how prospects were engaging with the property’s visuals. Having that visibility built into the platform now is a meaningful shift in how she evaluates her own marketing.
I really like the access to the analytics, because I think that’s somewhat new. So I’m really excited about this new feature, because now I can go on and look at it any time, and seeing the numbers, it looks great.
Summary
What began as a single ballroom tour has grown, under Audrey’s push, into full coverage of a complicated historic property, plus a self-guided history experience that adds a new layer of storytelling for guests.
For a team navigating three connected buildings with no simple floor plan, the tool has become as much a training foundation as a sales asset. Audrey’s own history with the platform, carried across five-plus Hilton properties, speaks to how deeply it’s woven into the way she approaches every new assignment.
Hayes Mansion San Jose Quick Overlook
- Segment: Historic Hotel, Curio Collection by Hilton
- Space: 214 rooms | 33,000+ sq. ft. meeting space across 24 private rooms and outdoor areas
- Facts: Expanded from a single-ballroom tour to full-property coverage, plus a self-guided history tour used for both guest engagement and sales team training