Tourpoint — Property Video Tours

Description

Built for property websites whose buyers are somewhere else.

Some of the people looking at your listings cannot come and see them. They are working in Dubai, studying in Toronto, or buying a home back in a country they left. They will not fly in on the strength of six photographs, and they cannot work out what six in the evening your time means where they are.

Tourpoint does two things about that.

A walkthrough video that respects the visitor’s data. Paste a YouTube, Vimeo or uploaded video link onto a listing. The page shows the property’s own photograph with a play button over it, and the video downloads only when someone presses play. Embedding a player on page load costs around half a megabyte and a dozen requests before the visitor has decided to watch — on a metered mobile connection that is the visitor’s money, spent without asking.

Viewing requests that do the timezone arithmetic. The buyer picks a day and an hour in their own time, from the countries buyers actually call from. The form shows them, as they choose, what that hour is where you are. You see the appointment converted into your timezone, with theirs beside it. Daylight saving on both sides is handled — including the fortnight each spring when two countries disagree about what time it is.

You set the hours you take calls, in your own time, and nothing outside them can be booked. A buyer in Los Angeles choosing eight in the evening is choosing six the next morning in Nairobi, and the form says so rather than putting it in your calendar.

The call itself happens on WhatsApp. That is deliberate: in-browser video calling needs relay servers somebody has to pay for and burns the visitor’s data, and a buyer on a weak connection in another country is exactly who this is for. One tap opens the chat.

Works with your theme

There are no templates to edit and nothing to override. The section takes its typeface and text size from the theme around it, so it looks like part of your site rather than a plugin dropped into it. Only the accent colour is yours to set, and it is one colour picker.

Put it on the page in whichever way suits your site: automatically under the listing, as a block, or with the [tourpoint] shortcode.

Nothing is lost to a mail problem

Every request is stored in WordPress, under Viewings, whether the notification email arrives or not. WordPress cannot reliably send mail on its own, and a booking that exists only in an email that never sent is a customer you never knew you had.

What it does not do

No calendars, no availability rules, no payments, no reminders, no syncing. If you need a full appointment system, use one. This does one thing: it gets a buyer in another country from a listing to a time you have both agreed on.

Privacy

Nothing is sent anywhere except the video provider you chose, and only after the visitor presses play. No tracking, no analytics, no external fonts, no calls home. The plugin makes no outbound request at all on its own behalf.