OK I finally managed to get this to work so here is my solution:
in my XML I added the following line to the end of the file:
<events onloadcomplete="looktohotspot(get(myHotspot),120, 'shortestway');" />
and in my page when I called the panorama with embedpano I passed myHotspot variable like this:
var fHotspot='shoes';
embedpano({
swf:"tours/tour1/tour.swf",
xml:"tours/tour1/tour.xml",
target:"pano",
html5:"never",
passQueryParameters: "false",
vars: {myHotspot: fHotspot}
});
so when the panorama loads it automatically focuses on the desired hotspot!
Thanks for everyone's help and I hope that I helped someone...