Booking a community venue shouldn’t take a dozen emails. Here’s how City of Sydney made it a lot simpler — and picked up a Better Future Award for it along the way.
Can people view a community venue before they book it?
That’s the question behind most venue-booking friction. Without it, you get phone calls, follow-up emails, and site visits just to answer “what does the room actually look like?”
City of Sydney solved this with a 24/7 self-service experience. We captured their venues and delivered them as one connected 3D Tour experience through SmartHub, our multi-tour navigation platform. Every venue page now has its own tour embedded right where people are already looking — Perry Park Recreation Centre and the Southern Hall at Glebe Town Hall are two you can explore right now.
What was slowing bookings down before this?
City of Sydney’s community venues team was spending hours every day running in-person tours and answering the same handful of questions about each space. Without a proper way to preview a venue, people often didn’t feel confident it would actually suit their event — so they’d ask for another tour, or send another enquiry, just to be sure.
How much time and money does this actually save?
Since the pilot launched across three venues, City of Sydney has recorded more than 1,000 unique virtual tour visits, a 50% drop in in-person tour requests, and a 44% drop in space-related enquiries. Every community member surveyed said the tours gave them more confidence booking a space. That builds on the headline figure from the award listing itself: booking touchpoints down from four to one, saving up to 65 minutes per enquiry.
That pilot has since expanded to more than 20 venues across the council’s community centres, childcare services, and landmark buildings — from Eveleigh Early Learning and Preschool to the Centennial Hall and Vestibule at Sydney Town Hall, and every connected room at the Rex Centre.
City of Sydney also found it cost less to produce than a standard photo or video shoot — which is what made it realistic to roll out across the whole community venues portfolio, rather than just a couple of flagship spaces.
What did SmartView Media actually deliver?
We worked with the City of Sydney team to bring their community venues into one connected 3D experience, captured using Matterport — technology that builds an accurate 3D model of the space rather than a flat set of photos. People can walk through a venue, jump straight to the area they care about, and see the practical detail that actually gets asked about: where the light switches are, where the toilets are, and how big a room really is, measured on the spot.
As Mark Mitchell, City of Sydney’s Digital Innovation Service Designer, put it in a video walkthrough of the project: “the impact of the tours has really been fantastic.”
Could this work for your venues?
If you’re managing more than one public space — halls, pools, community centres, meeting rooms — the same problem tends to show up: people asking questions your existing photos and floor plans can’t answer, and staff time going into explaining rather than booking.
Get in touch to talk through a group of public venues or community spaces you’re responsible for, and we’ll work out whether a connected experience makes sense for you.
Sources: 3D Virtual Tours – Optimising Venue Booking, Better Future Awards; City of Sydney – 3D Virtual Tours case study (video).
