Elevating Proactive Selling and Personalized Client Experiences with Visiting Media
Park Hyatt Aviara Resort, Golf Club & Spa is a AAA Five Diamond coastal retreat located in Carlsbad, California, just north of San Diego. Set across 250 lush, private acres, the resort offers a spectacular backdrop for meetings, incentives, conferences, and special events, with panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean and Batiquitos Lagoon.
Featuring 327 luxurious guestrooms and suites, the resort seamlessly blends sophisticated accommodations with world-class recreational amenities, including Aviara Golf Club, Southern California’s only Arnold Palmer-designed golf course, and the award-winning Miraval Life in Balance Spa.
Designed to inspire connection and productivity, Park Hyatt Aviara offers more than 200,000 square feet of indoor and outdoor event space, including approximately 78,000 square feet indoors. Venues include a nearly 12,000-square-foot Grand Ballroom and 23 versatile meeting rooms, many enhanced by natural light and private terraces to get attendees out to experience coastal breezes. Whether hosting executive retreats, conferences, incentive programs, or large-scale receptions, a dedicated events team specializes in personalized attention and meticulous execution, delivering the hospitality and sophistication synonymous with the Park Hyatt brand.
Bryan Hart, Director of Sales & Marketing, is in his fourth year with the property. He brought a strong background on virtual tour technology into the role, having worked with Visiting Media during eight years with Omni Hotels across four different properties.
Situation
With business split roughly 60% group and 40% transient, Park Hyatt Aviara’s meeting and event footprint includes a wide range of unique spaces: a variety of ballrooms and their configurations, multiple foyers, pre-function areas, and outdoor terraces. That complexity made it difficult to help clients understand not just individual rooms, but how attendees would actually move through the property.
Bryan had already seen the value of virtual tours to walk clients through a property they couldn’t physically visit, and he brought that experience with him to Aviara. He also draws a clear contrast with the alternative most properties defaulted to before tools like this existed:
The old way of walking around the property with your cell phone while you’re on a video call with the client(s), used to create challenges. Often times the signal would drop the call, or the video would pixelate right as you’re trying to show them something important for their program. The virtual tour eliminates those pain points and allows you to pull up the platform from the comfort of your office and walk the client through the meeting space as if they’re physically there, in high resolution, while viewing all spaces and angles.
Process
Park Hyatt Aviara implemented Visiting Media approximately two years ago, around the end of 2024, building a package that included 360-degree views, CGI-style imagery, and diagram-based setups of the property’s meeting spaces.
Proactive Selling in Every Proposal
The sales team, which includes six group sellers and a director of group sales reporting to Bryan, includes Visiting Media links in proposals, whether or not a client has asked for one. Bryan sees this as a way to get ahead of a client’s evaluation process, not just respond to it.
We’re being proactive with our approach. Whether the client is ready to plan a site visit yet or not, the sales team is sending the link of the virtual tour to take a look at our meeting space and get a feel for what this expansive ballroom looks like, or the beautiful outdoor terrace that I’m recommending for your reception and dinner. We believe this helps us land on the shortlist more quickly without waiting for a customer to reach out with questions.
Elevating Event Planning with CGI Setups
Once a group has booked, the event planning team takes over, using the different CGI setups to show clients exactly how a room will be set, whether that’s classroom seating, banquet rounds, or a custom layout.
The event planning team frequently uses the CGI portion to showcase different setups. We can show the client max seating of what can fit comfortably in the room with their staging and preferred setup, while moving around throughout different parts of the room, and it’s to scale. Or, if a client has questions and wants to change things in real time, they will be able to visually see how much space they have between tables and chairs, aisles, etc.
Personalizing Outreach with Recorded Video Messages
In the past few months, the team began adding personalized thank-you videos from Bryan, the General Manager, the Executive Chef, and the Director of Golf to their custom tours. Sales managers select the video that best matches a group’s interests, golf, food and beverage, or otherwise, so the outreach feels tailored rather than generic.
Results
More Time Back in the Sales Day
Bryan credits the platform with giving his team more time back, largely by making it faster to send a link tailored to what a specific customer is looking for rather than assembling materials from scratch.
A Trusted, High-Resolution Alternative to In-Person Site Inspections
For clients who are unable to travel for a site inspection, whether due to time constraints, illness, or distance, the platform gives them a way to evaluate the property’s meeting space from their own office or home with a level of detail that a phone-based video walkthrough can’t match.
Meeting a Luxury Clientele’s Expectations
For Bryan, the platform’s fit with Park Hyatt Aviara’s brand goes beyond convenience. He sees luxury travelers holding properties to a higher bar for how they present themselves, remotely or in person, and views a high-quality virtual tour as part of meeting that bar rather than a nice-to-have.
As client calendars are busier than ever, often times our customers look for more creative ways to see what we are proposing, without always having the time to conduct a full tour or visit a bunch of properties. I think that the high-end detail your platform provides of being able to walk through the proposed meeting space with actual content in a 360-degree format is extremely well received and aids in their decision-making process when they may not have time to travel.
A More Personal Follow-Up
The team is now adding personalized videos to their custom tours. While the practice is still new, Bryan expects them to help drive conversion by reinforcing to clients that their business is valued.
Big Win
Park Hyatt Aviara is having an all-time record year, with the property on pace for its most group rooms achieved in over a decade. Bryan points to Visiting Media as one of the sales tools behind that momentum, not the sole driver, but a meaningful contributor.
Visiting Media is one of the sales tools that has allowed us to achieve this success.
Summary
For Park Hyatt Aviara, Visiting Media has become a natural extension of how a luxury resort with this much variety in its meeting and event spaces tells its story. From proactive proposals to CGI setups overlays to personalized video follow-ups, the platform gives Bryan’s team a way to show, not just describe, the experience clients can expect on property, and to do it at the level of polish their luxury clientele has come to expect.
Park Hyatt Aviara Resort Quick Overlook
- Segment: Luxury Resort
- Space: 327 rooms | 200,000 sq. ft. total meeting and event space (78,000 sq. ft. indoors)
- Facts: Having an all-time record year for group business, with Visiting Media cited as one of the sales tools behind that momentum